The artificial intelligence company Perplexity has just completed a new fundraising in which several tech giants participated.
Generative AI has been applied to many functions over the past year. But one of the most promising uses seems to be one that would make this technology a replacement for our search engines, with chatbots potentially eventually replacing Google. If for the moment, the Bing Chat bet (now Copilot) has not worked, another company could one day succeed: Perplexity.
Fundraising with Jeff Bezos and Nvidia
Perplexity announced this week a new fundraising round, which allowed it to raise $73.6 million. Big names in the sector have joined the operation, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos or quite simply the world number one in semiconductors, Nvidia.
With the first round of funding in March 2023 which allowed it to raise $25.6 million, the Californian start-up raised nearly 100 million euros in less than a year. The artificial intelligence company is currently valued at 520 million euros.
Perplexity, the AI that can compete with Google?
Perplexity was founded in 2022, in San Francisco. It allows Internet users to carry out their search not using keywords, but by asking a question as would be done on ChatGPT. The company’s AI then generates a response, pointing out the links it relied on directly from the internet, giving it access to much newer sources than ChatGPT.
It also offers different options such as “focus”, a function through which it is possible to only obtain answers based on certain types of content, such as academic papers, Reddit or YouTube. And management believes it has in its hands the first serious competitor to Google in a very long time.
Thus, for CEO Aravind Srinivas, “ the days of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links and multiple web pages will be [à l’avenir] replaced by a much more efficient way of consuming and sharing information, propelling our society into a new era of accelerated learning and research. » In 2023, Perplexity “Served over half a billion queries “, or half of Bing’s activity over the same period.
Source : Zonebourse, Neowin
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