This One-Year-Old Startup Is Hoping to be the Next Google—Can It Succeed?

Perplexity AI cofounders Johnny Ho, Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats. Photo courtesy of Perplexity AI.

It’s not often that a young startup takes on a 25-year-old, $1.8 trillion tech behemoth. But for Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO at Perplexity AI, that’s just an average Tuesday.

Perplexity is hoping to create the next Google Search, infused with generative AI. The one-year-old startup has raised $100 million to fund that mission, most recently from IVP at a $520 million valuation. (We previously scooped the round here, and featured the company in our 50 Most Promising Startups list.)

I’ve been testing out Perplexity’s search engine for the past few months, and it has many of the features that I’ve found missing in alternatives like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing. Its answers are concise and to the point, it includes citations to articles to back up its statements, and it doesn’t have an overly cutesy, distracting personality.

Despite all its strengths and investor hype, though, the odds are stacked against it—most notably that it’s competing against the Silicon Valley powerhouse Google. Other companies have tried to take on the search engine giant and failed; last year, AI-powered search engine Neeva axed its consumer business after struggling to attract new users. In May, Neeva sold itself to Snowflake for $150 million, Supervised reported—just half of what it was valued in its last fundraising.