Perplexity raises $500M at $9B valuation

Perplexity, the AI-powered search startup, closed a $500 million funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners at a $9 billion valuation. The figure represented roughly a tripling of the $3 billion valuation SoftBank’s Vision Fund had set for the company in a $250 million round some six months earlier, in June 2024, which had itself followed a $520 million valuation set as recently as January that year — a pace of markup uncommon even by the standards of the period’s AI funding market.

Perplexity’s product combined a search interface with answers synthesised by large language models — drawing on models from OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta among others — returning cited, sourced responses rather than a list of links, and it had positioned itself as a direct alternative to both traditional search engines and general-purpose chatbots. The round arrived as OpenAI had recently launched its own ChatGPT Search feature and Google was building comparable capabilities into its core search product, intensifying competition in the space Perplexity had staked out.

The funding came alongside continuing legal exposure: Perplexity faced a proposed class action alleging copyright infringement and a separate suit from News Corp publications over the scraping of their content to generate answers, disputes that went to the core of how an AI-answer engine could license or justify its use of publisher material. The company had also been expanding by acquisition, including its purchase that same year of Carbon, a startup connecting AI systems to external data sources.

The round left Perplexity among the most highly valued AI startups outside the largest foundation-model labs, and set the valuation baseline against which its subsequent, still faster funding rounds through 2025 were measured.