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As the age of AI-driven search continues to usher in, Perplexity, the young startup building it entirely from scratch, is reaping the benefits. Today, the Aravind Srinivas-led company announced it has raised an additional $62.7M in funding in a round led by Y Combinator’s former head of AI Daniel Gross, doubling its valuation to over a billion. Just a few months ago, it raised $74M in a series B round.
While it is not surprising to see an AI company become a unicorn these days, what’s interesting is Perplexity has done it in a little over a year and in a space where Google dominates: Search. It plans to double down on this work with global expansion, driven by new partnerships in Japan and Germany, and a new Enterprise Pro plan designed specifically for organizations looking to take advantage of AI-driven knowledge discovery in their workflows.
In a blog post published today, Perplexity said multiple leading enterprises, including Zoom, HP and Databricks, are using the new B2B plan and saving hundreds of hours at work.
What exactly does Perplexity have on offer?
At a time when Google and Microsoft have enhanced their existing search products with AI models like Gemini and GPT-4, Perplexity is taking them on with an AI-native search experience built entirely from scratch.
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The startup’s “knowledge discovery” platform combines web indexes with a range of AI models to provide direct answers to every question a user may have, complete with relevant citations.
The experience is entirely conversational, where there’s just the information required and no need to click on different links (including ads/sponsored posts), compare answers or endlessly dig for information. This is exactly what Perplexity has repeatedly cited as its unique selling point – and it seems to be working. Since launching this product, including a paid tier billed at $20/month, the company claims to have grown aggressively to serving 169 million queries per month.
Now, with the fresh capital in its pocket, Perplexity is looking to take its work to the next level and reach more users, starting with a dedicated plan for enterprises.
As Srinivas explained in an X post, enterprise users were restricted from using Perplexity due to data and security concerns.
However, the new Enterprise Pro plan comes with SOC2 certification and alleviates all these challenges with enhanced privacy and security features, including secure single sign-on, user management, alerts about new file uploads and 7-day query deletion.
The plan, priced at $40/month or $400/year per seat, also ensures that the data uploaded or queried is not used for training LLMs powering the platform, the company noted in its blog post.
While the enterprise tier has just been announced, Perplexity has given early access to certain organizations to see how they could leverage secure AI-driven search in their workflows. This includes leading enterprises such as Stripe, Zoom, Bridgewater, Snowflake, the Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal McCann, Thrive Global, Databricks, Paytm, ElevenLabs, HP, Vercel and Replit.
Ali Ghodsi, the CEO of Databricks, said the enterprise tier of Perplexity enabled the company to accelerate research and development and save approximately 5,000 working hours per month.
Global expansion underway
While the enterprise plan will bring more users on board, it is just a part of Perplexity’s mission. The startup plans to go global with its product and is partnering with Japan’s SoftBank Corp. and Germany’s Deutsche Telekom to make that happen.
The engagements will essentially see Perplexity marketing and selling its AI search product to consumers and businesses associated with both companies in their respective markets.
“With a combined user base of more than 335M customers across mobile and broadband, these partnerships will significantly extend Perplexity’s reach,” it added.
Clearly, Perplexity is going all in with its AI-native search product. It will be interesting to see how Google and Microsoft revamp their respective generative AI search products to take the new unicorn in town.
