This was last updated to account for substantive news as of March 4, 2025
Perplexity baffles me!
It’s a fast-growing startup that has built a great product and is stirring competitive reactions from the likes of Google and OpenAI.
At the same time, it's sustainable competitive advantage is unclear, and it's saddled with growth expectations attached to a $3B valuation (maybe $9B).
To help wrap my had around Perplexity, I created a 2 year timeline to understand where they've been and help me think through where they might be going.
Read on for a fully sourced timeline of Perplexity's rise, covering:
- Fundraising
- Product Launches
- MAUs
- Revenue
- Legal action
- and more
🧑🤝🧑 Team
Founders:
- Aravind Srinivas - CEO
- Johnny Ho - CSO
- Denis Yarats - CTO
- Andy Konwinski - President / Board Member
Team Size: Approximately 250 (LinkedIn)
🗓️ Timeline
2022
August 2022
- Founded
December 2022
- 2 million MAUs
2024
January 2024
- Raised $73.6 million in Series B
- 10 million MAU's
- 500,000+ mobile app installs across iOS and Android
April 2024
- Raised an additional $62.7 million
- Valuation > $1B
- Total dollars raised: $165M
- 169M queries per month
- Launched Perplexity Enterprise Pro product
May 2024
- Launched Perplexity Pages product
- "your new tool for easily transforming research into visually stunning, comprehensive content."
June 2024
- Legal action threatened against Perplexity
July 2024
- Perplexity Publishers' Program Launched
- First batch of partners: TIME, Der Spiegel, Fortune, Entrepreneur, The Texas Tribune, and WordPress.com
- Read More
August 2024
- $35M annualized revenue
- Started 2024 with $5M annualised revenues
- 250M queries answered in July
- Reportedly closed $250M funding round at a $3B valuation
October 2024
- $50M annualized revenue
- 15M queries per day (est. 450M queries per month)
- Legal action: News Corp v. Perplexity
November 2024
- Raising $500M at a $9B valuation
- Shop via Perplexity
- Introduces Perplexity Merchant Program "to make it easy for large retailers to share their product specs with us, ensuring we can access live details on all the best available products"
December 2024
- "$500 million round of funding that triples the company’s valuation to $9 billion"
2025
January 2025
- "More than 15 million people, according to a spokeswoman, are regularly using Perplexity AI"
- "Perplexity’s plans for West Berkeley-based Read.cv, which had around three employees and was backed by funding from F7 Ventures and Fanjul Capital, aren’t clear."
- "You can build your own generative search capabilities powered with unparalleled real-time, web-wide research and the Perplexity features you've come to expect, like citations."
- Assistant uses reasoning, search, and apps to help with daily tasks ranging from simple questions to multi-app actions. You can book dinner, find a forgotten song, call a ride, draft emails, set reminders, and more.
February 2025
- Pro subscribers get unlimited Deep Research queries, while non-subscribers will have access to a limited number of answers per day.
March 2025
- "Deutsche Telekom (DT), said that it is building an “AI Phone,” a low-cost handset created in close collaboration with Perplexity, along with Picsart and others..."
- “Perplexity is transitioning from just being an answer machine to an action machine,” Aravind Srinivas, Perplexity’s co-founder and CEO, said onstage at the event. “It is going to start doing things for you, not just answering questions. It’s going to be able to book flights for you, book reservations for you, send emails for you, send messages, place phone calls for you, and all those sorts of things, like set smart reminders.”
🤔 Where does Perplexity grow next?
The big question: How is Perplexity going to grow into its $3B valuation?
Strengths
- Capital - they have more capital than other LLM search startups
- Product - their product is unequivocally better than Google for some category of queries
- Early mover advantage in AI-powered search
- Clear demand for alternatives to traditional search engines
Challenges
- Google and OpenAI are direct competitors with more resources and distribution
- Google and OpenAI have more brand recognition than Perplexity
- Perplexity has no proprietary distribution channels
- Google has its own devices and browser
- ChatGPT has apple devices
- OpenAI intends to build its own hardware
- Perplexity is facing legal challenges from publishers, and has less money to cut deals like OpenAI.
- I suspect that a lot of their fundraising is due to the need to cut deals with publishers
- Challenged business model
- An ad business is the only way to for them to go consumer at the scale they intend to reach
- Perplexity is trying, but it's fighting Google on its turf and that's a losing proposition
Questions on my mind
- What unique tech have they built?What’s the secret sauce that others haven't and can't crack?
- What F500 companies need that tech? Certainly there is a buyer out there.
- How do their economics / user-base hold up to scrutiny?
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