New information has emerged that Jeff Bezos has backed a $520 million startup that is trying to compete with Google’s dominance in web search using Artificial intelligence (AI) to change the path People look for the information Online.
The company is nicknamed Perplexity, where its prized product is a forum where you can “ask anything,” which its team of fewer than 40 people, based in San Francisco, US, calls an “answer machine,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
According to international media reports, Perplexity operates as a chatbot-style search engine that answers queries using OpenAI’s GPT technology. The app provides direct text answers to questions rather than links to websites, using information from online sources that it includes along with the answer.
Users can access a more powerful version of the Perplexity search engine using GPT-4, OpenAI’s most advanced technology, for $20 per month.
With that in mind, the concept caught the attention of Bezos, as well as other tech executives and venture capitalists, who invested $73.6 million in Perplexity’s latest Series B funding round, the startup said in a blog post Wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how much of the nearly $74 million investment was provided by Bezos. Because this amount represents the largest amount raised by an Internet search startup in recent years, The Journal reports, it includes money from “the ongoing support of our Seed and Series A investors… as well as new investors NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos (via the Bezos Expeditions Fund )). ),” among the others.
Amazon, the brainchild of Bezos, has famously committed billions of dollars to AI initiatives recently, including a $4 billion commitment to generative AI startup Anthropic, the startup behind the chatbot Claude, which promises to compete with ChatGPT.
Perplexity has raised $100 million to date, it said. The investment is valued at $520 million, according to The Journal.
Srinivas previously worked as a research intern at Google before landing a job as a research scientist at OpenAI. He held that position for only a year before co-founding Perplexity in August 2022, according to his LinkedIn page.
Perplexity’s website and mobile app have grown to reach 10 million people monthly, with 53 million visitors in November alone, up from 2.2 million when the service first became available in December 2022. This was reported by The Journal with reference to Likeweb data.
The founder told The Journal that the startup spent almost nothing on traditional marketing, relying on word of mouth and rumors about X to attract new users.
And despite publicly declaring their goal of increasing Google’s roughly 90 percent share of the online search market, Google executives themselves (including former YouTube executive Susan Wojcicki and Jeff Dean, senior vice president) have focused on AI research ) have invested personal funds in Perplexity, a company.
Experts say the company still has a long way to go if it wants to eclipse Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of $1.74 trillion, the fourth largest in the world.
Google, with a global workforce of nearly 140,000 people, has also invested heavily in answering the widest range of queries in more than 133 languages. Scaling in this way is a difficult task for a startup whose team has not yet exceeded 50 people, The Journal reports.
Meanwhile, Perplexity has not yet been listed on the stock exchange, and it is unclear whether the startup is planning an IPO in the near future.
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