According to the Wall Street Journal, the company Perplexity AI is reportedly negotiating a $500 million funding round led by Accel, the Palo Alto-based venture capital firm. This would boost its market capitalization to $14 billion instead of just $9 billion by November 2024.
This move coincides perfectly with the likely launch in May of the Comet project, which is nothing more than a software program halfway between a web browser and a chatbot. Which, obviously, aims to compete with the giant Google, which is currently in a delicate situation, by developing new technologies.
A promising company?
Founded in 2022, Perplexity continues to reshape the world of artificial intelligence. Indeed, its capitalization has continued to increase over the months and years, propelling it to the forefront.
To explain such success, we must focus on the technology used by AI. The latter provides answers in the form of sentences with links to the websites from which the information was obtained.
And this is a major advantage, especially compared to other AIs like ChatGPT, which is attracting professionals in the USA. Indeed, they will simply provide a list of links, like other search engines, which can cause some problems for users.
But this functionality is not everything when it comes to competition. It must be said that other companies are also moving forward at a good pace, as is the case with OpenAI, which added a search engine to ChatGPT, or the introduction of AI Overviews by Google during the month of May 2024.
A search engine that competes with Google?
In addition to this fundraising, which is still under consideration, new elements have emerged in recent weeks concerning the Comet project. Indeed, the teams at Testing Catalog observed a dedicated webpage for the upcoming browser, as well as a tab on Perplexity's page linking to Comet and a promotional video.
Although all these elements are now removed, the launch seems imminent and some media outlets, such as TechRadar, believe it will be mid-May. And this also coincides with this fundraising, which could well be completed soon.
As a result, Google seems to be gradually losing its monopoly and is giving way more and more to competitors like Perplexity. Furthermore, we must not forget that the Comet browser promises a seamless search experience to its users by encouraging them to indicate what they need in natural language.
Finally, Perplexity is also in talks with Apple to integrate AI into Safari. This, in the long term, could establish its dominance in this highly competitive market.
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