24th April 2024: Perplexity AI has bagged $62.7 million in funding, raising the artificial intelligence firm’s valuation to $1.04 billion. The AI engine also announced its foray into enterprise market.
AI answer engine firm which turned Unicorn stated that the fresh round of capital infusion will be deployed to expand consumption among consumers and knowledge workers within enterprises, said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, in a post on X.
We have many Perplexity users who tell us that their companies don’t let them use it at work due to data and security concerns, but they really want to. To address this, we’re excited to be launching Perplexity Enterprise Pro: Perplexity Pro comes with SOC2, SSO, user management, enterprise-grade data retention, and security warnings Aravind added.
Additionally, the AI startup has partnered with Deutsche Telekom and SoftBank to accelerate the distribution of the search engine to 116 million users globally.
Perplexity AI ventures into Enterprise Market
The startup has also introduced Perplexity Enterprise Pro, priced at $40 per month or $400 per year per seat, to provide AI search engine for organisations. Its offerings include SOC2 (system and organisation control), SSO (single sign-on) integration, user management, enterprise-grade data retention, and security warnings.
The company has onboarded several launch customers such as Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal Mccann, Paytm, Latham & Watkins, Vercel, Replit, NVIDIA, and HP, spanning the sectors of finance, legal, sports, advertising, software, and hardware.
“Cleveland is using Perplexity for researching ticket sales trends, HP for crafting compelling sales pitches, Amplitude for better understanding of the market landscape to generate tailormade marketing pitches, and Zoom for focused-searches on Perplexity,” the post said.
Established in 2022 by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s chatbot-like interface enables users to ask questions to provide summarised information accompanied by source citations.
The latest round of funding had participation from Investor and Y Combinator’s ex-head of AI, Daniel Gross, led the round, with participation from Stan Druckenmiller, NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lutke, and Garry Tan. Other investors include Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and venture capital firms Institutional Venture Partners and New Enterprise Associates.
A similar collaboration was unveiled previously by the firm with SK Telecom at the Mobile World Congress in February. In January, the San Fransisco-based firm raised $74 million in funding, nearing a valuation of $540 million.
Futhermore, in its attempt to match the tech giant Google, the AI-based search engine merged AI and chatbot technology to deliver responses to user inquiries using large language models such as GPT-4, Claude 3, and Mistral Large, alongside custom models.
