Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI search engine founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. By late 2025, the company was valued at $18 billion in early-stage funding talks (CNBC, March 2025), up from $9 billion in December 2024, and was generating just under $100 million in annualized revenue. In January 2025 the company made an unsolicited $65 billion merger proposal for TikTok's U.S. business (later withdrawn). Perplexity became a fixture of the Trump-administration policy ecosystem in 2025-2026, and the company is widely reported to have raised additional capital in 2026 amid intensifying competition with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.