According to The Wall Street Journal, AI search engine Perplexity AI is raising a new round of funding that will value the company at $1 billion led by Solo VC Daniel Gross, making it the first unicorn on AI Search.
Just 2 months ago, Perplexity raised $73.6 million led by IVP, valuing the company at $520 million, with a team of only 39 people. Perplexity’s valuation has doubled from $520 million to $1 billion in just 2 months.
Daniel Gross is a famous Solo VC with Nat Friedman and Elad Gil, he is the co-founder of the AI accelerator AI Grant, and accelerator Pioneer. In addition, he and Nat Friedman raised a $1 billion investment fund called C2 Investment last year, focusing on early-stage AI and infrastructure companies.
Yesterday, Elad Gil also shared his idea about the search engine industry I think it’s interesting:
Search products in the 2000s used to be fact-centric or directional (help you navigate to X). Search is increasingly merging w LLM chat products. Search has now split into 3 types of products:
Search engine. Help me find facts / get somewhere
Opinion engine. Here is what my ethics team thinks you should believe (could be via blue links or LLM output)
Answer engine. Lets get you a synthesis (fact-based) on your query
Search is crucial in the AI era, Gartner recently predicted search engine volume will Drop 25% by 2026, due to AI Chatbots and Other Virtual Agents.
Then last week, the information said OpenAI is also developing an independent search product, which may be based on Microsoft Bing's functionality but take a knowledge-based approach beyond traditional keyword searches.
Now, Perplexity AI stands in a good position, but the war for AI search engines may have just begun.
The team behind Perplexity AI is highly executable, here is a list of what they have done recently:
Mar 6: Partner with Nothing on the launch of Phone 2(a). Everyone who buys the Phone 2(a) in the first week of sales gets 1 year of Perplexity Pro worth 200$ for free.
Mar 6: Claude 3 (Opus and Sonnet) is now available on Perplexity Pro.
Mar 5: Made Playground AI as the default image generation model on Perplexity for Pro users.
Feb 28: Mistral Large is now on Perplexity Pro.
Feb 26: In partnership with SK Telecom, all SK Telecom users will soon get access to Perplexity Pro.
I use perplexity almost every day now, you?