Perplexity doubles its valuation to reach $1 billion. ChatGPT’s rival, backed by Bezos and Nvidia, targets businesses with a new secure chatbot.
Perplexity is a chatbot that allows users to search the web using AI. The conversational platform responds to user requests by indicating quotes and the sources from which it obtained the information, in order to provide more transparent answers.
AI-powered search platform Perplexity has raised $62.7 million in venture capital to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. This latest funding round brings the total capital raised by Perplexity to $165 million and doubles its total valuation to more than $1 billion.
Daniel Gross, former head of AI at Y Combinator, led the round, joined by Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, Dylan Field, CEO of Figma, and Jakob Uszkoreit, one of the former Google researchers who developed the original Transformer model. Existing investors including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, former Tesla AI head Andrej Karpathy and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke also participated in the round.
“We will use this additional funding to expand our use among consumers and knowledge workers in businesses” said Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “We look forward to continuing to accelerate and grow and provide accurate knowledge and information to every person on the planet.“
In addition to its funding, Perplexity announced its first offering aimed at businesses. Perplexity Enterprise Pro is a tailored version of its chatbot, which the startup touts as a tool to optimize employee workflows. Business customers have access to an unlimited number of file uploads and search support requests.
“Perplexity’s response engine crawls the internet in real time and provides complete, verifiable responses with quotes, as well as multimedia responses including graphics, videos and images to provide more context“, according to a company press release. “Instead of searching for an answer and having to navigate spammy websites full of affiliate links, Perplexity streamlines your employees’ workflow and saves them time.“
Enterprise Pro users can easily add and remove team members to limit access to the chatbot. All requests are automatically deleted from the system after seven days. Perplexity also comes with voice-to-text capabilities, allowing employees to query the chatbot using their voice.
Perplexity has also achieved SOC2 certification, an accreditation issued by external auditors that indicates that a product processes user data securely. Perplexity has committed to not training its large language models on data from enterprise users.
Perplexity Enterprise Pro costs $40 per month or $400 per year per user. It has already been the subject of limited deployment. Zoom, synthetic voice developer ElevenLabs and HP are among the first users. Zoom’s product teams used the new Perplexity offering to help with target research, while HP’s sales staff used the platform to research potential customers.
Data platform developer Databricks is also an early adopter. Ali Ghodsi, the company’s CEO, said the platform had enabled the business “to significantly accelerate R&D, which enabled our engineering, marketing and sales teams to act more quickly“.”We estimate that it saves our team 5,000 hours of work per month” said Mr. Ghodsi.
Perplexity has also entered into partnerships to expand its reach, including with SoftBank and German telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom.
Source : Perplexity
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