Report: Perplexity Creating $50 Million Venture Fund for AI Startups
Perplexity AI is reportedly creating a $50 million venture fund focused on U.S.-based pre-seed and seed artificial intelligence (AI) startups.
The company, which is an AI startup itself, will be an anchor investor in the fund, but outside limited partners will provide most of the capital, CNBC reported Tuesday (Feb. 25), citing unnamed sources.
Reached by PYMNTS, Perplexity declined to comment on the report.
It was reported in December that the company closed a $500 million funding round earlier that month, with its backers including SoftBank, Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
The round tripled Perplexity’s valuation to $9 billion.
On Monday (Feb. 24), Perplexity announced that it plans to launch its own web browser, dubbed Comet, and invited people to sign up on a waitlist.
The company said in October that its search engine served over 100 million queries per week.
In November, Perplexity introduced an AI-powered shopping assistant called Buy With Pro that helps shoppers both research and purchase products.
Forty-two percent of U.S. venture capital was invested into AI companies in 2024, up from 36% in 2023 and 22% in 2022, HSBC Innovation Banking reported in December.
“Venture capital has always gravitated toward transformative industries, but the level of consolidation we’re seeing within one category is unprecedented,” HSBC U.S. Innovation Banking Head Dave Sabow said at the time in a press release.
“The radical change this investment will fuel places us in the dawn of ‘The Agentic Age,’ an era where autonomous artificial intelligence capabilities fundamentally redefine how we communicate, work and interface with digital and physical worlds,” Sabow said.
Three startups in robotics and cloud AI collectively raised $2.3 billion recently, PYMNTS reported Tuesday.
Figure, which makes humanoid robots for home and business, reportedly is in talks to raise $1.5 billion in a Series C funding round; Lambda, a cloud AI startup that is building a hyperscaler cloud for AI developers and end users, raised $480 million; and Together.ai, which is also building an AI cloud for AI applications using open-source models and training custom models, raised $305 million in a Series B funding round.
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