AI Search with Cited Sources Perplexity Raises $25.6 Millions

IBL News | New York

AI search startup, San Francisco–based Perplexity.ai, which was launched in December 2022 and reached two million monthly active users in four months, announced it raised $25.6 million in series A.

The funding round was led by Peter Sonsini of New Enterprise Associates (Board member, Databricks) with participation from seed round investors Elad Gil (Founder, Color Health), Nat Friedman (Former CEO of GitHub), Jeff Dean (SVP, Google AI) and Bob Muglia (Former President of Microsoft), as well as new investors Susan Wojcicki (Former CEO of Youtube), Paul Buchheit (Creator of Gmail), Soleio (Designer of Messenger, Dropbox), and Databricks Ventures.

Analysts saw remarkable the presence of six current and former AI researchers at Google.

On its search results, the Perplexity platform offers up a new model by providing citations to every answer and allowing attribution for sources of information for verification. Recently, it released an iPhone iOS app with instant answers, cited sources, voice search, follow-up questions, and thread history.

Since its launch, Perplexity has been releasing new features to users every week.

The funding in Perplexity is one of the latest deals in the booming AI industry. Character.AI, also founded by former Googlers, recently raised $150 million. Adept, another AI startup, announced it had raised $350 million from investors including Spark Capital and General Catalyst.