Perplexity AI, a San Francisco, CA-based company providing a conversational AI-powered answer engine, raised $25.6M in Series A funding.
The round was led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from Databricks Ventures and existing angel investors Elad Gil (co-founder Mixer Labs/Color Health), Nat Friedman (former CEO of GitHub), Bob Muglia (former CEO of Snowflake and President of Microsoft) and Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail).
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate its growth and expansion plans, including developments on user sign-in, optimizing the application’s knowledge database and continuing to protect user privacy.
Formed in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity AI is the builder of a generally available conversational answer engine that draws from credible sources in real-time and directly answers users’ questions with sourcing and citations.
Commenting on the news, Aravind Srinivas said: “When people search online for answers to their questions, they are presented with endless lists of links that can be manipulated by advertisers and search engine optimization. Individuals are then tasked with sifting through those websites and distilling the information, much of which may not be accurate in the first place. With Perplexity AI, we aspire to fix all of that.”
Previously available via the company’s website and as an extension on the Chrome Web Store, the new iOS application enables Perplexity to introduce new features like user sign-in for personalization, persistent search history and social sharing.
FinSMEs
28/03/2023