Perplexity, an artificial intelligence-driven search engine, has closed its fourth funding round this year, tripling its valuation to $9bn as it seeks to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.
The $500mn round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with involvement from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price, according to multiple people with knowledge of the deal. Previous investors have included SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, as well as several prominent names from the AI industry such as OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun.
The San Francisco-based group has grown rapidly this year, with its product receiving hundreds of millions of queries a month. It has 15mn monthly active users with most of that traffic coming from the US.