Brand

Verified 6 November 2026

Perplexity

A San Francisco AI company that runs Perplexity, an answer engine which replies to questions in plain language and cites the web sources it used.

It was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas (CEO), Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, and launched its search product in December 2022. Its products now include the paid Perplexity Pro and Max tiers, a Search API for developers, the Comet AI browser (launched July 2025, made free in October 2025), and Perplexity Computer, a multi-model agent for Max subscribers announced on 25 February 2026. Perplexity describes its approach as model-agnostic, orchestrating many third-party models, and also offers its own Sonar model, which Wikipedia says is based on Llama 3.3.

It is privately held, with investors reported to include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia and Databricks, and a valuation reported at about $21 billion in early 2026. It also faces copyright and scraping suits from publishers and platforms, among them Dow Jones and the New York Post, Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Reddit and CNN, and Perplexity has disputed claims that it ignored robots.txt. These are allegations; some remain unresolved.