Perplexity Surpasses $100 Million in Annualized Revenue

Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, recently highlighted the company’s impressive financial milestone, announcing on LinkedIn that the AI search engine startup has exceeded $100 million in annualized revenue. This achievement comes just 20 months after introducing Perplexity Pro. Srinivas also noted a remarkable 6.3x year-over-year growth for the company, despite its products being significantly under-monetized.

Perplexity offers a diversified pricing strategy with a free tier, a $20 monthly Pro plan catering to users seeking expanded features, and an enterprise option priced at $40 per month per seat for businesses with fewer than 250 employees. Additionally, developers can integrate Perplexity’s Sonar AI models through its API offerings.

The company is reportedly in the midst of discussions to secure funding between $500 million and $1 billion, elevating its valuation to an impressive $18 billion. This potential valuation represents a doubling from the $9 billion assessed in the previous funding round last December when Perplexity raised $500 million. The company has attracted significant support from influential backers, including NVIDIA, SoftBank Group, and Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.

Perplexity has made its proprietary AI model, Sonar, accessible to all Pro users, alongside other major models on the platform. Pro users now have the option to set Sonar as the default model through their settings. Built atop Meta’s open-source Llama 3.3 70B and powered by Cerebras Inference, touted as the fastest AI inference engine globally, Sonar produces a remarkable 1200 tokens per second. Previously, this model was available exclusively to developers via API.

In recent months, startups focusing on AI-enabled products have demonstrated exceptional growth with lean teams. For instance, Cursor, an AI-powered coding platform, reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) within just 21 months of its inception. It achieved a phenomenal increase from $1 million to $100 million in ARR in a mere 12 months, setting a record for the fastest-growing SaaS company.

Last year, MidJourney, an AI image generator, achieved $200 million in ARR with a team of just 11 employees. Similarly, Bolt.new, another AI-driven coding platform, surpassed $30 million in ARR with a team of just 20 employees, reaching over 3 million users in little more than four months.