For Google Challenger Perplexity, Growth Comes at a High Cost

Artificial intelligence–powered search engine Perplexity has rapidly increased its subscription revenue and users in the past year, despite tough competition from the free AI search tools of Google and OpenAI. Previously unreported financials show the cost of that growth.

Perplexity generated $34 million in revenue last year. But it burned about $65 million in cash as it spent heavily on cloud servers and AI models from Anthropic and OpenAI, which power many of the search engine’s answers, according to financial documents.