Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI, Inc. runs what it calls an answer engine: a search product that reads the live web, writes a short synthesised answer and prints numbered citations back to the pages it used. The company was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, and launched its main search product on 7 December 2022. It is headquartered in San Francisco.

Perplexity does not train frontier models of its own. It routes queries across models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others, layered on its own retrieval index. Perplexity Computer, the cloud agent it began shipping in the week of 27 February 2026, draws on nineteen different models and is sold on the $200-a-month Max tier; a local counterpart, Personal Computer, reached general availability on Mac on 7 May 2026. That model-agnostic position is the company's stated advantage and also its main structural exposure, because several of its suppliers compete with it directly.

The product line now runs well beyond search. Comet, an AI browser, launched in July 2025. Perplexity signed a $750 million, three-year commitment to use Microsoft Azure alongside its existing AWS relationship, reported on 30 January 2026, giving it access to Microsoft Foundry models from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. Distribution deals have been mixed: a $400 million cash-and-equity arrangement to put Perplexity search inside Snapchat, announced in November 2025, ended amicably in the first quarter of 2026 without a broad rollout.

Revenue has moved quickly with the shift to agents. Annualised revenue was approaching $200 million in September 2025 and had passed $750 million by late August 2026, up from under $250 million at the start of that year, according to The Information. Nvidia was reported on 23 August 2026 to be weighing participation in a new round at a valuation above $30 billion, which would be more than double the $20 billion set in September 2025.

Perplexity is also the most litigated of the AI search companies. The New York Times, Dow Jones, the BBC, Nikkei, Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun and Reddit have all brought or threatened claims over content use. In one significant win, the Ninth Circuit on 4 August 2026 vacated a preliminary injunction that had barred the Comet browser from acting on Amazon accounts, holding that it is the user, not Perplexity, who accesses the site.