Perplexity AI reportedly closed a $500 million funding round earlier this month.
The round tripled the artificial intelligence (AI) startup’s valuation to $9 billion, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (Dec. 18), citing an unnamed source.
Reached by PYMNTS, Perplexity declined to comment on the report.
The company’s backers include SoftBank, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, according to the report.
Perplexity AI started 2024 with a valuation of $520 million. During the summer, it was valued at $3 billion.
HSBC Innovation Capital said Monday (Dec. 16) that 42% of U.S. venture capital was invested into AI companies in 2024 — up from 36% in 2023 and 22% in 2022 — and that as of 2024, 20 AI companies have each raised $2 billion or more.
“Venture capital has always gravitated toward transformative industries, but the level of consolidation we’re seeing within one category is unprecedented,” HSBC U.S. Innovation Banking Head Dave Sabow said in a Monday press release.
BlackRock said Dec. 7 that it expects 2025 to be a big year for infrastructure and cybersecurity, with the AI boom playing a major role in those investments.
“It’s still very early in the AI adoption cycle,” Jay Jacobs, BlackRock’s U.S. head of thematic and active ETFs, told CNBC.
Perplexity said in November that it launched an AI-powered shopping assistant in the U.S. and plans to expand it to additional markets. The new Buy With Pro is available to Perplexity Pro users and helps shoppers both research and purchase products.
In October, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the AI search company is serving over 100 million queries per week and aims to boost that figure to 100 million queries every day.
Srinivas also said in October that Perplexity wants to form revenue-sharing partnerships with news publishers. He added that the company could supply publishers with chatbots that would respond to users’ queries on the publishers’ websites, using their content to provide answers.
His comments came two days after Perplexity was sued by two News Corp-owned publishers that allege that the company’s AI search engine uses their copyrighted content to answer users’ questions and takes traffic that otherwise would have gone to the publishers’ sites.
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