Startup Perplexity gets $500 million valuation to rival Google’s new AI search

Venture capital firm IVP is leading an investment in Perplexity, a developer of an AI-powered search engine that competes primarily with Google’s SGE and, at a distance, with chat-based tools like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Browsing. Perplexity uses both of these rivals’ LLMs to power its search-focused service. The deal values the year-old company at about $500 million, up from a post-investment valuation of $150 million in a previous funding round in March. Perplexity had $3 million in annual recurring revenue as of this month and is in talks to raise about $50 million.