Perplexity AI, Inc., or simply Perplexity, is an American privately held software company offering a web search engine that processes user queries and synthesizes responses.[4] Perplexity products use large language models and incorporate real-time web search capabilities, providing responses based on current Internet content, citing sources used.[5] Its real-time search engine (API service) is called Sonar and is based on Meta's Llama model.[6] A free public version is available, while a paid Pro subscription offers access to more advanced language models and additional features.
Perplexity AI, Inc., was founded in August 2022[7] by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. As of September 2025, the company was valued at US$20 billion.[8]
Perplexity AI has faced legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized use of content, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times.[9][10] According to separate analyses by Wired and, later, Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of websites that prohibit or explicitly block web scraping.
History
In August 2022, Perplexity AI, Inc., was founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning.[11] It launched its main search engine on December 7, 2022, and has since released a Google Chrome extension and apps for iOS and Android.[5][12] In February 2023, Perplexity reported two million unique visitors.[5] By April 2024, Perplexity had raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion. As of June 2025, Perplexity closed a $500 million funding round, elevating its valuation to $14 billion.[13]
Products and services
Search engine web portal
Perplexity’s primary offering is an online information retrieval system (search engine) that uses large language models to generate responses to user queries by searching and summarizing web-based content.[14] Perplexity offers a feature known as Perplexity Pages that generates structured summaries and report-like content from user queries by aggregating cited sources.[28] Perplexity is available to web users without charge or registration, a freemium model.[29]
Perplexity Pro
Perplexity Pro is a subscription tier, a more capable paid "enterprise" service, including stronger security and data protection[29]
Leadership
Aravind Srinivas is the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI.[46][47][48] He previously held research positions at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and other AI research institutions focusing on machine learning and artificial intelligence.[49][50] In a March 2026 All-In episode, Srinivas said the incoming AI-related layoffs were a "glorious future" to "look forward" to, as it freed people from jobs they didn't like and gave them opportunities to pursue entrepreneurship.[51]
Controversies
Copyright and trademark infringement allegations
In June 2024, Forbes publicly criticized Perplexity for using their content. According to Forbes, Perplexity published a story largely copied from a proprietary Forbes article without mentioning or prominently citing Forbes. In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some "rough edges" and accepted feedback but maintained that Perplexity only "aggregates" rather than plagiarizes information.[52][53][54]
In October 2024, The New York Times sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity demanding that it stop accessing and using NYT content, claiming that Perplexity is violating its copyright by scraping data from its website.[55]
See also
- List of artificial intelligence companies
External links
References
- Kyle Wiggers. Perplexity launches AI-powered answer engine TechCrunch, 2022-12-09, retrieved 2025-08-03^
- Alex Konrad. Perplexity AI Solves Search With Conversational AI Forbes, 2023-07-24, retrieved 2025-08-03^
- David Pierce. Perplexity launches Comet, its first browser with AI search