AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, according to the Wall Street Journal.
If a deal happens with those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s valuation from its $3 billion valuation when it raised from SoftBank over the summer. The WSJ reports that the company currently receives about 15 million queries a day and brings in around $50 million in annualized revenue.
Perplexity uses AI to help people search the web in a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, and The New York Times has even sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and has “no interest in being anyone’s antagonist here.”
These fundraising talks come after OpenAI announced raising a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the line between chatbot and search engine, the company is moving more directly into search with SearchGPT.
Perplexity did not immediately respond to a TechCrunch request for comment.