The Startup Powering Perplexity, Meta's AI Search

There’s a lot of excitement around artificial intelligence disrupting search. Consumers and businesses increasingly use AI tools in lieu of traditional search engines such as Google. OpenAI has added search features to ChatGPT, Meta Platforms is crawling and indexing the web for its Meta AI chatbot and the AI search startup Perplexity is nearing a $9 billion valuation. A host of other AI companies provide information about current events in their chatbots. 

But one company central to AI-powered search has been mostly missing from the hubbub: Brave, the maker of a privacy-minded web browser. The company powers search capabilities for and sells access to its web index to Meta, Perplexity, Mistral, Cohere and others. 

Brave’s co-founder and CEO, Brendan Eich, wants to set the record straight: Many of the companies claiming AI-powered search aren’t actually search engines.