Big Money, Big Moves: Perplexity Gets $500M in Funding
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Welcome to the AI Chat Podcast. I'm your host, Jaden Schafer. Today on the podcast, we're talking about the fact that Perplexity has allegedly just raised a massive new $500 million round. If you're watching this over on YouTube or Spotify, you can see the videos and the visuals. I'll be sharing my screen and breaking down exactly what's going on. If you're on Apple, check out the link in the description to the YouTube channel, and you can also see that. All right, so what is really impressive is not just the fact that Perplexity, in my opinion, has raised this $500 million.

million dollar round and warranted. I'll say that they've refused to kind of comment on the story, but this is essentially the rumors coming out this closed in December. But what's interesting to me is that they are also actively acquiring companies. They're not slowing down. We'll get into all of that in the podcast today. I think this is an absolutely fascinating story. Before we get into it, I wanted to mention if you've ever wanted to start an AI side hustle or grow and scale your current business or however you make money using AI tools, I would love to have you as a member of the AI hustle school community. We have

dozens and dozens of videos. We have over six different courses that break down exactly how I have been able to do that. So every single week, my co-host and I, Jamie, we release an exclusive video that's essentially covering a tool, a strategy, how much money we make, what tools we use, what exact side hustles we use, how we're growing our businesses, all the stuff we can't share publicly, really exact numbers and tools and workflows all inside of this, uh,

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They've raised this $500 million round. What is their exact valuation? This values the startup at $9 billion. This is absolutely incredible to watch how fast they have been growing and actually moving. So all of this apparently was reported by...

by Bloomberg, who has a bit of an inside scoop on this, allegedly. So this will be interesting to see how this continues to roll out in the future. So they were apparently citing some familiar sources, which said that the round was actually led by institutional venture partners. It closed earlier in December. And

They're still being pretty tight-lipped about it. No one wants to talk about it. But this huge new tranche that they've just pulled in is coming as this whole area is really heating up, right? So Perplexity is known for being kind of this competitor to Google in the AI space with a lot of their AI tools. But they're not the only ones doing this now. Google is trying to compete more heavily with them. OpenAI recently launched their ChatGPT search, which is, you know, trying to be a competitor to them. They got quite serious about it back in October of – October 3rd.

Now, I would say they have a lot of really cool things over on ChatGPT that they've started to add. For example, restaurants. If you do like a search for the best restaurant near me, ChatGPT is now able to give you like much more what you call rich results. So you can imagine, you know, there's like images. So if you search for something like, you know, best food place in Toronto,

Toronto, for example. Hopefully that works because Canada has some interesting laws. But in any case, typically, yeah, okay. Toronto is a bad example, by the way. I'm live asking ChatGPT this while I did this.

And they did not want to give me... They didn't want to give me anything. Actually, you know what? Here's a real problem on ChatGPT right now. And it says that search is unavailable. Anyways, maybe that's because I got started with 01. So we've got to go to an older model to be able to use this and...

See, in any case. All right. So if you ask for best food places near me, ChatGPT is now adding some images. All right. I tried it again. And you really have to know exactly how to work ChatGPT. And this is actually a perfect example of why perplexity is doing good. So this whole thing that I've just been talking about.

I initially went to Chachupi and I said, best food places in Toronto. It just gave me kind of like a list of some places, but no pictures. It's just a basic Chachupi response with text that you would...

typically expect. And that is because chat GPT by default had me selected on their O one model. It's the most advanced model, but the problem is the most advanced model doesn't have the search built in. So I had to go manually switch to go to GPT chat GPT for, Oh, go and select to have search enabled. And once I did that and made a search, it pulled up this really cool looking map, which had

you know, cited sources, which you could click to get directions. You could go to their website, you could call them, um, you could kind of scroll through a bunch of different things. It feels very Google, very search engine ask. There's a lot of like really cool, um,

You know, there's a lot of really cool things. If you click on getting directions, it's going to open you straight up to go and actually get directions on maps. So that sounds awesome. But the problem is I had to go jump through a bunch of hoops. And when I did my first search, it didn't just automatically give me what I wanted. So I think for this reason, yeah.

But perplexity is still going to be beating ChatGPT, and I don't think it's going to be this huge competition because you can imagine, like, people aren't going to want to click through all of those hoops. Perplexity really is streamlined, and so I think this is going to be –

opening, I really would have to fix some of that to, uh, to, to solve the problem. So I don't think that's going to be an issue. Anyways, there's a, there's competition. Chachapiti is doing this. Google's doing this, but Google might actually do something new, which is a little bit, it may be scared for perplexity, but we'll see. I think perplexity so far has been pretty far out and ahead. Um,

The information this week reported that Google is planning to take a little bit more of a approach where they're going to be creating actual chatbot and AI mode that's built straight into search, that's super integrated, that hopefully is going to compete with perplexity. Because up until this point, we've seen, you know, Google add some AI summaries at the top and chat GPT sort of added GPT search, but nothing really competing with perplexity as I've just

demonstrated live on here. And so I think this is a big issue for a lot of these players. Perplexity really is just scooping up a ton of market. And I think that some of the big players are getting quite concerned about this. So with all of this being said, perplexity is not just resting. They're continuing to go. And that is because they've actually went and acquired a new company called

This is really interesting. This is kind of one of their first acquisitions. But Carbon is essentially helping you to connect AI search to your work files. So you can imagine right at your office, right on your computer, you have all these files. You want to use AI to search through them all. And Carbon is helping you do that. Perplexity is now helping you do that. So you can imagine with Perplexity, you can search, get an incredible search engine. But at the same time, you're searching through all of your local files.

This makes it so much more competitive, so much more useful. And when a company like Google comes out, Google's trying to do this in their own way where they're letting you search through, you know, your Gmail and your docs maybe with some of their Gemini assistants, but they're not going to have the local files on your computer, maybe PDFs you've created in Canva or other places and downloaded or Microsoft files. And so perplexity getting all the access to this, I think is going to be a massive game changer. We know that most companies do not use Google files.

you know, free suite. Usually it's different tools out of Microsoft, like PowerPoint and, you know, Microsoft Word and all of that kind of stuff. And so I think this is going to be absolutely massive. I'm super excited to see where this goes and I'll keep you up to date on all of it.