Artificial-intelligence search company Perplexity has begun fundraising talks in which it is looking to more than double its valuation to $8 billion or more, as startups try to ride the coattails of OpenAI’s recent big investment. Perplexity has raised three rounds of funding in the past year—an unusually fast pace even by the standards of Silicon Valley. In January, it was valued at $520 million. By this summer, its valuation had grown to $3 billion. Its efforts to raise more money so soon at a substantially increased valuation will be a test of how eager investors are to own a piece of buzzy AI startups showing signs of market traction. OpenAI, whose ChatGPT dominates the market, recently closed one of the largest funding rounds in Silicon Valley history, raising $6.6 billion at a valuation of $157 billion. Perplexity has told investors it is looking to raise about $500 million in the new funding round, according to people familiar with the matter. The terms could change and the funding might not come together. The startup’s annualized revenue—an extrapolation of the next 12 months’ revenue based on recent sales—is currently about $50 million, the knowledgeable people said. In March, its annualized revenue was a little over $10 million. Founded two years ago and backed by Jeff Bezos, Perplexity is a combination search engine and AI chatbot. It scours the web for current information like Google and provides answers to questions like ChatGPT. Perplexity currently earns money by selling premium subscriptions to consumers. It recently launched an enterprise version for corporate customers that searches their internal files and will soon start selling advertisements, broadening its sources of revenue.

Full exclusive : Search-based chatbot maker, Perplexity AI seeks to raise about $500 million in what would be its fourth funding round in a year and value it at $8 billion.