ccording to a source who is familiar with this matter, the search startup AI Perplexity is raising a new investment that can increase the startup valuation
from $8B to $9B. This investment represents a significant aspect that is able to highlight the interest of investors in artificial intelligence startups and companies.
So, the search startup is expected to raise $500 million in this new Perplexity funding round, which is mostly led by the venture capital firm IVP (Institutional Venture Partners). This venture capital firm also has a board seat in Perplexity AI startup.
Back in January this year, the company managed to raise $73.6 million in a Series B Perplexity funding round. It should be mentioned that this Series B Perplexity funding round was also led by the IVP venture capital firm and valued the company at $520 million.
The success of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence startups has tempted various investors to invest in startups in order to adopt this powerful technology because it is known that these LLMs (large language models) need billions in funding to adopt innovative technologies.
Also, last month, the OpenAI startup closed a $6.6B funding round and managed to raise the company value to $157B which also led to making the OpenAI company the most valuable private company in the world.
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After the ChatGPT release, various publishers have raised concerns about the chatbots and their ability to search the internet in order to find various information and data and generate summaries for users.
For this concern, the media conglomerate called News Corp has sued recently the Perplexity AI startup, and claims that the company has been involved in a “massive amount of illegal copying". News Corp stated that AI Perplexity managed to generate based on their copyrighted work summaries for users.
Also, the New York Times has noticed the search startup that demanded to stop using their newspaper content to generate AI summaries and answers for users.