Perplexity Eyes $8B Valuation in New Funding Round

The Wall Street Journal reports that AI search engine Perplexity is in talks to raise money

The $8 billion company wants to get around $500 million.

If that deal goes through, it would make Perplexity worth more than twice as much as it was when it raised $3 billion from SoftBank in the summer. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company gets about 15 million questions daily and makes about $50 million yearly.

Perplexity is a chatbot-style app that uses AI to help people search the web. Some news outlets have accused the company of plagiarizing and taking content from other websites without permission. The New York Times even sent Perplexity a letter telling them to stop, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with news outlets and doesn’t want to be anyone’s enemy here.

These talks about getting money come after OpenAI said it would raise $6.6 billion at a value of $157 billion. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other products have made distinguishing between a chatbot and a search engine hard. With SearchGPT, the company is going more directly into search.