This AI startup founded by IIT Madras alumnus is valued at $520 million

Srinivas, the company's CEO, had previously interned at DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI before assuming the role of a research scientist at OpenAI.

"What Perplexity is, today, is what Larry Page wanted Google to be, 23 years ago..."

This is Aravind Srinivas, an alumnus of IIT-Madras and the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, who finds himself in a David vs. Goliath scenario as he challenges industry giants such as Google and Microsoft Bing in the search engine space.

Perplexity AI, founded by Srinivas, Denis Yarats (former Facebook AI research scientist), Andy Konwinski (co-founder of Databricks), and Johnny Ho (former Quora engineer), earlier this week bagged $73.6 million in funding from US chip maker Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others.

The funding round, led by Institutional Venture Partners with additional support from NEA and Databricks Ventures, valued the AI startup at $520 million. The company has raised $100 million to date.

Srinivas, the company's CEO, had previously interned at DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI before assuming the role of a research scientist at OpenAI.

While the valuation is modest in the Generative AI ecosystem, this marks a significant milestone for the 16-month-old startup. The funding also comes at a time when tech giants Google and Microsoft are incorporating AI into their search engines.

Perplexity features a chatbot-style interface, enabling users to ask questions using day-to-day language. Similar to Microsoft, Perplexity provides an AI assistant named Copilot.

“With Perplexity’s search tools, users get instant, reliable answers to any question with complete sources and citations included. There is no need to click on different links, compare answers, or endlessly dig for information,” Srinivas said in a blog post.

“In an era where misinformation and AI hallucinations are causing increasing concern, we’re built on the idea that accuracy and transparency are prerequisites to making AI-powered search ubiquitous,” he added.

The company claims it has grown to 10 million monthly active users and has served over half a billion queries in 2023.

Srinivas claims that "the times of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple web pages will be replaced by a much more efficient way to consume and share information."