Perplexity AI

Founders

• Aravind Srinivas (India · ♂) — After a Berkeley AI PhD under Pieter Abbeel and research stints at OpenAI and DeepMind, he set out to build a trustworthy answer engine and co-founded Perplexity in 2022.
• Denis Yarats (Russia · ♂) — A reinforcement-learning researcher at Facebook AI, he teamed up with Srinivas to apply LLMs to web search as Perplexity's CTO.
• Johnny Ho (United States · ♂) — A competitive-programming champion turned quant trader and Quora engineer, he joined as a co-founder to lead Perplexity's systems and product engineering.
• Andy Konwinski (United States · ♂) — A Databricks co-founder and Spark contributor from Berkeley's AMPLab, he helped start Perplexity as a co-founder and investor.

Team & hubs

Around 1,413 people on the team.

In the network

Perplexity AI, the AI answer engine and search browser company, has raised $936M across five rounds from a backer base that spans strategic and financial investors including NVIDIA, IVP, New Enterprise Associates, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Databricks. With a connection score of 60, it sits in a frontier-AI cluster bound together by shared capital, overlapping most with Uniphore (four shared investors) and, with two shared investors each, with Anthropic, Wayve, VAST Data, Twelve Labs, Sana Labs, World Labs, and DeepL. That mix of foundation-model peers (Anthropic, World Labs), AI infrastructure (VAST Data, Databricks as a backer), and applied AI companies (Uniphore, Wayve, DeepL) places it at the center of a broad applied and infrastructure AI funding network. The company employs 1,413 people, concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area (25%), with smaller hubs in London (10%) and New York (10%).