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The answer engine that transformed AI search — and now autonomous agent workflows
HQ: San Francisco, CA | Founded: 2022 | Employees: ~400 | Stage: Series E-6 (late-stage VC; 2028 IPO target) | Website: https://www.perplexity.ai
Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI 'answer engine' founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Instead of ten blue links, it returns a cited, synthesized answer grounded in real-time web retrieval via its own crawler (PerplexityBot), an index of hundreds of billions of pages built on Vespa, a hybrid lexical+embedding ranking funnel with cross-encoder rerankers, and its in-house Sonar models (fine-tuned from Llama 3.3 70B, served on Cerebras at ~1,200 tokens/sec). The company has expanded from search into the AI-native Comet browser, the multi-model autonomous-agent platform Perplexity Computer, developer APIs (Sonar/Agent/Search), an enterprise suite, and consumer subscriptions (Free/Pro/Max), while shifting to a subscription-only model i
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