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Given the long list of companies that have tried and failed, challenging Google<\/a> seems to be a losing proposition. Yet Amazon<\/a> founder Jeff Bezos recently placed a bet<\/a> on Perplexity AI, a startup that, despite the daunting odds, is taking on the search giant.<\/p>\n \u201cStartups are all about being bold,\u201d Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas recently told<\/a> Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAre you building a company that has unbounded potential? That\u2019s risky, but there\u2019s an infinite reward if it works.\u201d<\/p>\n Founded in August 2022, Perplexity aims to challenge Google by offering an AI-based search engine<\/a> that is \u201cpart chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers,\u201d as its website states<\/a>.<\/p>\n In January, Srinivas shared in a blog post<\/a> that Perplexity had grown to 10 million monthly active users and had served over half a billion queries in 2023. He also revealed that the company had raised $73.6 million from venture capitalists, companies including Nvidia<\/a>, and various angel investors\u2014as well as Jeff Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions Fund.\u00a0<\/p>\n The funding round valued Perplexity at about $520 million. Now, just a few months later, the venture is finalizing a new funding deal at a valuation of around $1 billion, according to a report this week<\/a> by the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, which cited unnamed people familiar with the matter.<\/p>\n If accurate, that means Bezos\u2019s investment has nearly doubled in the space of a few months. No doubt the ability of Perplexity to quickly reach 10 million\u00a0monthly active users impressed him, just as, nearly three decades ago, the \u201cstartling statistic\u201d of the web growing at 2,300% a year inspired him to start Amazon<\/a>.<\/p>\n He wasn\u2019t the only investor to take notice of the startup\u2019s rapid growth. Perplexity is \u201cone of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,\u201d said Jonathan Cohen, VP of applied research at Nvidia, in the January funding announcement. Artificial intelligence, he added, will \u201ctransform how we access information.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n CEO Srinivas certainly believes so, and he\u2019s taken numerous digs at Google search, which he believes has grown tiresome.<\/p>\n \u201cGoogle is going to be viewed as something that\u2019s legacy and old, and Perplexity will be viewed as something that\u2019s the next generation and future,\u201d he told<\/a> Reuters in January.<\/p>\n Of course, Google isn\u2019t sitting still. Indeed, it\u2019s been testing<\/a> AI-powered search on millions of users.<\/p>\n Srinivas recently told<\/a> Fortune<\/em>, however, that Google \u201chas 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.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Perplexity makes money by offering a Pro version for $20 per month that allows users to pick from various large language models, among them OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4, Anthropic\u2019s Claude 2.1, or the venture\u2019s own LLM Perplexity.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur 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,\u201d Srinivas told Fortune<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n He\u2019s also counting on people increasingly turning to AI chatbots instead of Google as they look for things online.<\/p>\n \u201cThe 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,\u201d he wrote in the January announcement<\/a>. And as told<\/a> the Wall Street Journal<\/em> around the same time, \u201cIf you can directly answer somebody\u2019s question, nobody needs those 10 blue links.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, even Perplexity does hit a $1 billion valuation, it has a long way to go to truly challenge Google, which has enormous resources and AI talent at its disposal\u2014and whose parent Alphabet is valued at $1.7 trillion.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\nSubscribe to the Eye on AI newsletter to stay abreast of how AI is shaping the future of business. Sign up<\/a> for free.<\/div>\n