Jeff Bezos’ investment in this AI startup has doubled in value in a few months. It's a major Google rival (2024)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has heavily bet on Perplexity AI, a startup that is taking on the search giant Google. Earlier, the funding round valued Perplexity AI at about $520 million but now the company is finalizing a new funding deal at a valuation of around $1 billion, the Wall Street Journal reported citing people in the know. This means that Jeff Bezos' investment has nearly doubled in the company in just a few months as Perplexity AI has reached 10 million monthly active users.

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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Fortune, “Startups are all about being bold. Are you building a company that has unbounded potential? That’s risky, but there’s an infinite reward if it works.” The company which was founded in August 2022, is challenging Google by offering an AI-based search engine that is “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers", it has said.

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In January this year, Perplexity reached 10 million monthly active users and served over half a billion queries in 2023, its CEO said sharing that the company raised $73.6 million from venture capitalists, Nvidia, and various angel investors including Jeff Bezos. Jonathan Cohen, VP of applied research at Nvidia, said that Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs” as artificial intelligence will “transform how we access information.”

Perplexity AI's Google rivalry

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The company's CEO told news agency Reuters, “Google is going to be viewed as something that's legacy and old, and Perplexity will be viewed as something that's the next generation and future.”

Google “has no incentive to actually move fast and nail this product experience because their core money is coming from making people click on links and view links,” he told Fortune, adding, “Our value proposition is that the free product is already so good that you can still use it without having to pay for it, but the paid product is going to be insane.”

In the company's January announcement he wrote, “The times of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple web pages will be replaced by a much more efficient way to consume and share information."