Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered search startup Perplexity AI is looking to hire a candidate to help expand its operations in India.
The role requires the candidate to be based in India, work in a startup environment, and travel to meet strategic partners and institutions, as announced by the company's cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas on LinkedIn.
This hiring push is significant, as Perplexity AI has garnered more than a million users in India, reflecting the growing popularity of the service, which has become a hot topic in Silicon Valley.
Founded in August 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity AI launched its answer engine in December 2022. The company recently closed a $500 million funding round, which tripled its valuation to $9 billion, according to reports.
Backers of the firm include Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.
"We want that number to expand to like 10-100X more because the Indian population is so big," Srinivas said in an interview with Moneycontrol.
The answer engine, which aims to challenge tech giants like Google and Microsoft, currently boasts over 10 million active users worldwide.
Srinivas further noted that awareness of Generative AI among the Indian public is quite strong. "A lot of people are aware of ChatGPT and large language models...They are already using these technologies in creative ways."
"So, I think we are going to see a lot more faster movement in the AI revolution in India compared to the previous web and mobile revolution, where we were a little behind the rest of the world," Srinivas added.
The company has even received praise from competitors.
AI data cloud firm Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer, Sridhar Ramaswamy, recently told Moneycontrol that Perplexity’s Application Programming Interface (API)-driven approach allowed it to innovate quickly and build a successful product.
This is particularly significant because Ramaswamy’s own company, Neeva, a competitor to Perplexity AI, tried to build a search engine from the ground up but ultimately found it unsustainable.
“At Neeva, we spent three years creating a search engine from scratch, where we did the crawl, we did the indexing, we did a lot of heavy work. Perplexity came quite a bit later, and they simply relied on APIs and produced a great product. That really was what drove the positive momentum for the company. All startups have limited shelf lives in terms of how much you can keep going. My team in the last year sort of was tired of the uncertainty of being a startup and the relentless number of fundraising rounds that you must do. Perplexity created a great product, and they've been very quick to innovate. I give Aravind (Aravind Srinivas, founder)—also an IIT-Madras graduate, a lot of credit. What they have done is truly remarkable,” Ramaswamy said.
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