Perplexity funding: Every round, investor, and valuation (2026)

Perplexity is an AI answer engine. Instead of a page of links, it reads the web, writes a short answer, and cites its sources. Around that core it now sells the Comet browser, an agent product called Computer, and paid plans for consumers and businesses.

Perplexity has raised about $1.7 billion across nine announced rounds since 2022, all of it equity. Its last closed round, a $200 million extension in September 2025, valued the San Francisco company at $20 billion.

Perplexity's backers range from venture firms such as IVP, NEA, and Accel to Nvidia, SoftBank, Jeff Bezos, and Cristiano Ronaldo. Most of their money arrived in an 18-month burst from early 2024 to late 2025. Let's dive into Perplexity's funding history.

Perplexity's funding falls into three eras: a small seed and Series A from AI insiders, a 2024 run of rounds that took it past $1 billion, and a 2025 Series E that kept reopening at higher prices. Rounds got bigger as the product spread, but never approached the size of the model labs it competes with.

Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski founded Perplexity in August 2022. Srinivas had worked at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind, and the seed round read like a list of his former field: Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Berkeley's Pieter Abbeel, and Ashish Vaswani, a co-author of the paper behind the transformer.

The Series A followed in March 2023, led by Pete Sonsini at NEA. Perplexity announced it alongside its first iPhone app. Databricks Ventures joined too, an early link to Databricks' own funding history as one of the best-funded AI infrastructure companies.

IVP's Cack Wilhelm led the Series B in January 2024 and took a board seat. Nvidia and Jeff Bezos joined through the same round, which gave a two-year-old search startup the backing of the world's biggest chipmaker and Amazon's founder.

Three months later, former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross led a follow-on that roughly doubled the price. Perplexity said it had raised $165 million to date. It used the announcement to launch Enterprise Pro and to name distribution deals with SoftBank's Japanese carriers and Deutsche Telekom.

The next two rounds came faster. Bloomberg reported a SoftBank Vision Fund 2 investment in June 2024, though SoftBank's own check was only $10 million to $20 million. Perplexity never announced that round itself.

In December, IVP came back to lead the Series D, and Perplexity's valuation tripled in about six months.

Accel led the Series E in May 2025. Perplexity then reopened the same series twice, in July and September, each time at a higher price per share.

That approach let Perplexity take money in smaller pieces as revenue grew. The September extension came when annualized revenue was approaching $200 million, according to TechCrunch.

Share filings tracked by Forge Global list one more tranche, a Series E-6 dated late September 2025, of up to $525 million at the same share price as the $20 billion round. No company release or major outlet has reported it, so it is left out of the round count and the $1.7 billion total. If it closed in full, total funding would be about $2.25 billion.

Cristiano Ronaldo took an undisclosed stake in December 2025 as part of a brand partnership. Perplexity built an interactive hub around him on its platform.

Perplexity's valuation rose about 38-fold in 20 months. Every step followed a jump in users or revenue, and Perplexity has not reported a profit.

The steepest climbs came in 2024, when the price doubled in April and roughly tripled twice after that. The 2025 steps were smaller: about 1.6 times from December 2024 to May 2025, then about 1.4 times across the two extensions.

Revenue has since caught up with some of that price. The Information, reported by Reuters, put annualized revenue above $750 million in August 2026, up from under $250 million at the start of the year.

In August 2026, Reuters reported that Nvidia was in talks to invest in a new round at a higher price. Nothing had closed by the end of September. The breakdown of how Perplexity's ownership is split covers the founders' control and what each investor class holds.

Perplexity's cap table mixes three kinds of money: venture firms that led the priced rounds, strategic investors that also sell to or distribute Perplexity, and a long list of AI researchers and founders who wrote personal checks.

IVP is Perplexity's most important venture backer. It led two of the nine rounds, the Series B and the Series D, and its partner Cack Wilhelm sits on the board.

IVP bought in at $520 million and paid about 17 times that price less than a year later. Its bet is that answer engines can take share from Google before Google rebuilds search around AI.

NEA led the Series A and came back for the Series B and the 2024 follow-on. Accel arrived late, leading the 2025 Series E at $14 billion, and its price set the base for the two extensions that followed.

Nvidia has invested in Perplexity since the Series B and joined later rounds. It is now in talks to invest in the next one.

The fit is commercial as well as financial. Perplexity's models run on Nvidia chips, whether in its own cloud contracts or its suppliers' data centers. Much of the money Perplexity raises flows back into Nvidia's chip-selling business.

SoftBank Vision Fund 2 invested in 2024 with a small check by its standards. The bigger value to Perplexity was distribution: SoftBank's mobile carriers in Japan offered customers a free year of Perplexity Pro from June 2024.

That pairing of capital and distribution is typical of SoftBank's founder-led approach to AI. SoftBank is a far larger backer of OpenAI.

Jeff Bezos invested through Bezos Expeditions in the Series B and has joined later rounds. His backing sits awkwardly next to Amazon's lawsuit against Perplexity's Comet browser, filed in November 2025.

The angel list is long. It includes Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Figma's Dylan Field, Y Combinator's Garry Tan, Altimeter's Brad Gerstner, Stanley Druckenmiller, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Several of Perplexity's most useful partners never bought shares. Airtel gave its 360 million customers in India a free year of Pro in July 2025, and PayPal and Venmo users got a free year in September 2025.

Samsung put Perplexity's API behind Bixby on the Galaxy S26. Bloomberg reported in June 2025 that Samsung was nearing an investment, but no closed deal has been reported.

Perplexity spends its funding on model and cloud costs, on giving its product away to win users, and on small acquisitions. Unlike the frontier labs, it does not build giant data centers.

Perplexity built its business on other companies' models. It pays OpenAI and Anthropic for access, runs on Amazon Web Services, and layers its own search and ranking on top.

In January 2026, Perplexity signed a $750 million, three-year deal for Microsoft Azure, which gives it access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI. That contract alone is close to half of everything Perplexity has raised.

The labs it buys from play in a different league. OpenAI's latest funding round was $122 billion, and Anthropic's $65 billion Series H in 2026 was more than 35 times Perplexity's total.

A large share of Perplexity's spending goes into getting the product in front of people for free. Comet became free worldwide in October 2025 and reached Android in November 2025 and iPhone in March 2026.

Perplexity also pays to be the default in other companies' products. It agreed to pay Snap $400 million in cash and stock to power Snapchat's search, a deal the two ended by mutual agreement in early 2026. The carrier and PayPal promotions cost Perplexity a year of subscription revenue per user in exchange for reach.

Perplexity set aside a $42.5 million pool for publishers through Comet Plus, a $5 monthly subscription that sends 80% of its revenue to news outlets. The program is also a response to the lawsuits that its answers copy publishers' work.

Those lawsuits are a growing cost. Dow Jones and the New York Post sued in 2024, followed in 2025 by Encyclopaedia Britannica, Reddit, and the New York Times. Reddit's case targets the scraping of its threads, data that Reddit's licensing business sells to Google and OpenAI.

Perplexity's acquisitions have been small team purchases. It bought Carbon, a data-connector startup, in December 2024 and Read.cv in January 2025, and none of the terms were disclosed.

Its bids were much larger than its balance sheet. In August 2025, Perplexity offered $34.5 billion in cash for Google Chrome, backed by unnamed investment funds, as a possible remedy in the US antitrust case against Google. Chrome was never sold, and the offer cost Perplexity nothing beyond attention.

Perplexity's growth now comes from paid products rather than ads. It paused its ad business in early 2026 and bet on subscriptions, enterprise seats, and Computer, an agent launched in February 2026 that handles multistep tasks for usage-based credits. The company reported more than 100 million monthly users across its products in March 2026, and device deals such as Bixby on Samsung's Galaxy S26 are pushing it onto phones.

The product roadmap points toward agents that act rather than answer, with Computer and Comet doing the work. That is what the next round would pay for: more computing power, including a reported September 2026 deal with Crusoe to train Perplexity's own models on Nvidia hardware, which would cut its reliance on rival labs.

Srinivas said in June 2026 that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028, a date its chief business officer called the earliest, so a private round with Nvidia is the likely next step. The risks are the lawsuits from publishers and Amazon, the cost of renting models from competitors, and Google's AI-driven search business, which puts AI answers at the top of its own results for free.

Perplexity has raised about $1.7 billion across nine announced rounds since 2022, all in equity. The largest were two $500 million rounds: the Series D in December 2024 and the Series E in May 2025. Share filings list one more tranche that would bring the total to about $2.25 billion, but the company has not announced it.

Perplexity's lead investors are IVP, NEA, and Accel. Other backers include Nvidia, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Jeff Bezos, Databricks Ventures, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Stanley Druckenmiller, Tobi Lütke, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Perplexity was valued at $20 billion after its $200 million extension in September 2025, its last closed round. In August 2026, Reuters reported Nvidia was in talks to invest at a valuation above $30 billion, but that round had not closed by the end of September 2026.

No. Perplexity is private and has not filed for an IPO. CEO Aravind Srinivas said in June 2026 that the company is planning a listing in 2028, which its chief business officer called the earliest date.

Perplexity is owned by its four co-founders (Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski), its employees, and its investors, led by IVP, NEA, Accel, Nvidia, SoftBank, and Jeff Bezos. Exact stakes are not public, and no single investor is reported to hold a controlling share.