Perplexity is reportedly planning to raise $8 billion in funding

AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at a valuation of $8 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal..

If the deal goes through on these terms, Perplexity’s valuation might be greater than double what it was at its $3 billion valuation obtained from SoftBank over the summer. According to WSJ, the corporate currently receives about 15 million inquiries a day and generates about $50 million in annual revenue.

Perplexity uses artificial intelligence to help people search the Internet using a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the corporate of unauthorized web crawling and plagiarism, and The New York Times even sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and has “no interest in being anyone’s business here.” antagonist.”

Fundraising talks began after OpenAI announced it had raised a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the road between chatbot and search engine, the corporate is moving more directly into search with SearchGPT.

Perplexity didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.