Perplexity approaches the second fund collection in six months to a $ 14 million rating

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Perplexity, the artificial intelligence search engine, ends a round of funding that would raise the launch of $ 14 million, a $ 5 million leap from the rating it achieved six months ago, as it is capitalized on a hot market for AI investments.

The $ 500 million round is run by the Risk Capital Firm, according to two people who are aware of the agreement. It would be the fifth round of perplexity funding in less than 18 months.

The perplexity, which aims to break the dominion of two decades of the Google search market, is between a new generation of AI start-ups they have attracted an intense interest of investors.

San Francisco’s company closed its Round prior In December with a $ 9 million rating. Originally sought a new funding with a $ 18 million assessment, according to several people who know the rise, but an investor said that sponsors were not willing to duplicate the price of perplexity.

Previous investors include NVIDIA, New Enterprise Associates, IVP and SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Some heavyweight weights of great technology have also supported the company, including Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, Openai’s co -founder, Andrej Karpathy, Google Ai, Jeff Dean and Yann Lecun’s Yann Lecun.

Perplexity It offers a AI search chat whose purpose is to rival the Google and Openai offers. CEO Aravind Srinivas told the Financial Times last month that perplexity would need more cash to finance their future products and build its user base.

“At this time we serve as users of 30 million, but if you want to be a product that reaches 100 million or 500mn, the type of scale you need to consider great technology, this needs more capital,” he said.

The company has recently launched a voice mode, which allows users to instruct Ia search through voice commands to Apple devices, such as sending emails and find videos on YouTube.

Perplexity plans to combine Openai and Anthropic rivals to offer an “agentic browser”, called Comet. These tools autonomously open a web browser and search online as a human in response to users’ orders.

A person close to the company said that a main reason for the recent fundraising was to finance the development of the browser, which would aim to be a Google Chrome replacement. The new funding was reported by The Wall Street Journal.

The perplexity achieves most of its revenue by subscriptions to Premium. He claims that his annualized income, a whole year revenue projection based on extrapolating sales of the latest month, grew last year from $ 5 million in January to $ 35 million in August.

Perplexity and accepted they refused to comment. Last month, Srinivas said that “the computer power needed to process users’ requests) and the infrastructure eats most costs” and that the company had good cash reserves.

“It is not very common for companies to have so much capital, valuation and income, but so few people.” Perplexity employs about 200 employees.

“It will be expensive to make the browser and these agents,” he added.