Jeff Bezos has backed a $520 million startup that aims to challenge Google's web search dominance by using artificial intelligence to change the way people find information online.
The company's prized product, called Perplexity, is an “ask-anything” forum that the San Francisco-based team of less than 40 people calls an “answer engine.” According to the Wall Street Journal.
Perplexity functions as a chatbot-style search engine that uses OpenAI's GPT technology to answer queries.
Information from online sources is used to generate a direct text response to the question, rather than a website link, and that information is included with the answer.
“No one needs those 10 blue links when you can directly answer someone’s question,” CEO Aravind Srinivas told The Journal.
For $20 per month, you can access a more powerful version of Perplexity's search engine that uses OpenAI's most advanced technology, GPT-4.
The concept caught the attention of Bezos and other technology executives and venture capitalists, who collectively invested $73.6 million in Perplexity's latest round of Series B funding. Revealed in a blog post on wednesday.
It was not immediately clear how much of the roughly $74 million investment Bezos provided.
The amount is the largest amount raised by an Internet search startup in recent years, the Journal reported. The funding comes from “continuing support from seed and Series A investors, as well as funding from new investor NVIDIA.” [and] Jeff Bezos (through the Bezos Expeditions Fund), etc.
Amazon, Bezos' brainchild, has recently spent billions of dollars on AI efforts, including a $4 billion investment in generative AI startup Anthropic, creator of ChatGPT rival chatbot Claude. It also includes dollar commitments.
The newspaper reached out to Bezos' Expeditions Fund and Amazon for comment.
Perplexity said in a post that it has raised $100 million to date. According to the Journal, this investment makes his Perplexity worth $520 million.
According to his LinkedIn page, Srinivas previously worked as a research intern at Google before taking a position as a research scientist at OpenAI. He said he only held this position for one year until he co-founded Perplexity in August 2022.
Perplexity's website and mobile app are now used by 10 million people every month, with 53 million visits in November alone. That's up from 2.2 million when the service first became available in December 2022, The Journal reported, citing data from Similarweb.
The founders told the Journal that the startup spends almost nothing on traditional marketing and relies on word of mouth and buzz about X to attract new users.
And despite publicly sharing a goal of upending Google's roughly 90% market share in online search, former YouTube chief Susan Wojcicki and Jeff, a senior vice president focused on AI research, Google's own executives, including Dean, have made personal investments in the company, Perplexity. Mentioned in a blog post from March 2023.
Perplexity still has a long way to go to overtake Google, whose parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of $1.74 trillion (the world's fourth-largest company).
Google, which has approximately 140,000 employees worldwide, also invests heavily to answer the widest possible range of queries in more than 133 languages. Scaling like this is a difficult challenge for a startup whose team doesn't yet exceed 50 people, the Journal reported.
Meanwhile, Perplexity is not yet listed on the stock exchange, and it was not immediately clear whether the startup was planning an IPO in the near future.
Representatives for Perplexity did not immediately respond to The Post's request for comment.
