According to informed sources, AI search engine startup Perplexity AI completed a $500 million funding round earlier this month, boosting its valuation to $9 billion. This means the company's valuation has doubled in just six months. Previously, a June investment from SoftBank had valued the company at $3 billion.

This funding round was led by Institutional Venture Partners. CNBC reported in November that Perplexity was nearing completion of an investment from IVP. Representatives from both Perplexity and Institutional Venture Partners declined to comment.

Funding, Investment

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Perplexity is one of many hot AI startups that have seen significant valuation increases this year. Venture capital firms and investors are competing to invest in companies focused on artificial intelligence.

Since the beginning of this year, there have been frequent large investments in the AI sector. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI model, announced in November that Amazon would be making an additional investment of $4 billion. In the same month, Elon Musk informed investors that his AI company xAI had raised $5 billion, reaching a valuation of $50 billion. In October, OpenAI announced it had raised $6.6 billion at a historic valuation of $157 billion.

Despite the controversies surrounding data and copyright that AI startups face, this does not seem to deter capital inflow. In October, News Corp, the owner of The Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, accusing the company of copyright infringement. OpenAI is also facing a similar legal challenge, with a lawsuit filed by The New York Times last year, claiming OpenAI used "millions" of articles to train its ChatGPT model. Both startups have denied these allegations.

The surge in Perplexity AI's valuation and the frequent large investments in the AI sector reflect a high level of optimism in the capital markets regarding the future development of artificial intelligence. Despite facing challenges, AI startups continue to attract substantial funding, signaling that competition in the AI field will intensify in the coming years.