Category: News | Published: 2025-09-03
Perplexity
Perplexity is a San Francisco-based company founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, a former Google and OpenAI researcher. Despite being just three years old, the firm has already become one of the highest-profile challengers in the generative AI space. Its core product is a real-time AI-powered search engine that provides conversational answers with source links, setting it apart from rivals like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
The company has attracted major backing, including funding from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, chipmaker Nvidia, and Japan’s SoftBank, and was valued at around $18 billion as recently as July. Perplexity says it now serves around 30 million monthly active users and has partnerships with publishers such as Time and the Los Angeles Times.
Last month, it launched Comet, an AI-native browser designed to help users summarise web content, manage tabs more intelligently, and automate tasks such as scheduling and online shopping. Comet combines local device processing with cloud-based models, including GPT-5, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s own Gemini. Srinivas has described it as a _“cognitive operating system”_ rather than a conventional browser.