A year ago, OpenAI, Notion and X wanted to acquire startup Perplexity for $150-200M
- In the summer of 2023, the startup received three purchase offers at once
- X, OpenAI and Notion wanted to acquire all of Perplexity
- All offers valued Perplexity at $150-200 mln
- Social network X was the most active in negotiations on the purchase.
- X wanted to use its technology for search functions
- Microsoft was also considering buying Perplexity
- In the spring of 2024, Perplexity's valuation was $3 billion, now it's at $8 billion
- It's showing strong growth thanks to its subscription-based products
- ARR was just $2.5 million a year ago, now it's at $50 million
- That said, Perplexity hasn't started generating any revenue yet
- Perplexity will spend about $15-20 million on OpenAI models over the year
- Perplexity will launch monetization through advertising by the end of the year
- Perplexity plans to sell advertising at 10 times the market value
- Ads will be as relevant as possible in terms of content and timing
- Perplexity's advertising approach will be different from Google and others.
- Perplexity may soon reveal the search index volume
- It will probably amount to about tens of billions of documents
- By comparison, Google's index is 400-500 billion documents