A research startup recently collected $ 26 million to offer a rival powered by AI to Google.
Perplexity AiWho presents itself as a “conversational search engine”, has closed a financing tour of the series, led by new Enterprise Associates, in the participation of Databricks Ventures and providential investors, in particular the former CEO of Github, Nat Friedman And the chief scientist of Meta, Yann Lecun. The Fresh Sent comes as Perplexity reports that it had 10 million monthly visits and 2 million unique visitors in February only.
It is far from the estimated 89 billion Google visits had in May 2022. But Perplexity is betting strongly on its AI technology to distinguish it from operators operators.
The perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, engineers with background in back-end systems, AI and automatic learning. Yarats was an automatic staff learning engineer at Quora for several years before joining Meta as a IA researcher, while Srinivas is interned in Deepmind and Google and then joined Openai as an AI researcher. Ho worked as an engineer in Quora, then as a quantitative merchant at Wall Street, and Konwinski was part of the founding team of Databricks.
Unlike a typical search engine, Perplexity offers a chatbot type interface that allows users to ask questions in natural language, to which its AI answers by quoting sites and sources on the web. Users can ask follow -up questions to dive deeper into a particular subject and perplexity will answer according to the context of its previous responses.
This is not a new concept. The propulsion of AI Cat And Bing Cat, similarly, allow users to get answers to questions about a number of subjects asking for the conversation. But the founders of Perplexity claim that their technology works better, in terms of precision. (Today’s chatbots are known for “incredible“Or simply invent, answers questions.)
“We have built a conversational response engine of its kind which is based on the provision of precise and relevant information through quotes,” said Srinivas in a press release. “When people are looking for answers to their questions online, they are presented with endless lists of links that can be manipulated by advertisers and optimization of search engines. Individuals are then responsible for passing through these websites and distilling information, a large part of which may not be exact in the first place. With the perplexity AI, we aspire to repair all of this. »»
It is an ambitious mission. But perplexity is advancing, publishing an iOS application in recent days which has features such as user connection for personalization, persistent research history and social sharing.
Srinivas says that series A funds will be set up on the growth and expansion levels of perplexity, including “the optimization of the application database of the application”.
“This is a first step in our mission to build the most transparent information service in the world and to maximize the knowledge and productivity of the average consumer,” he added.
Perplexity is only the last startup of the AI generator space to attract the attention of disproportionate investors. Last month, the character. Ai, a personalized chatbot platform, closed a series A of $ 150 million to an evaluation of $ 1 billion. According to a pitchbook report released In March, VCs regularly increased their positions in a generative AI, from $ 408 million in 2018 to $ 4.8 billion in 2021 to 4.5 billion dollars in 2022.