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The valuation of leading AI companies in Silicon Valley is still soaring. According to The Information, Perplexity AI is wrapping up a new round of equity financing, with NVIDIA in talks to participate. S. S. dollars valuation after its previous financing round. S. AI startup founded in 2022, whose founding team includes three post-90s generation members. In December 2025, football star Cristiano Ronaldo also announced his investment in Perplexity and became its global brand ambassador. This company initially focused on AI conversational search services, and has now launched AI agent products that can automatically perform complex computer tasks.

If this round of financing is closed, the four-year-old company will become one of the highest-valued independent players on the AI search track. Interestingly, before discussing equity investment, NVIDIA initially considered another plan: spending billions of dollars to purchase partial technology licenses from Perplexity and poach some of its employees. But the negotiations eventually shifted to more traditional equity investment. Many people's impression of Perplexity still stays at "a smarter AI search that can search and summarize". When you ask a question, it directly provides a comprehensive answer with source links.

If you only regard it as the search version of ChatGPT, you will seriously underestimate this company. The core founding team of Perplexity all have backgrounds marked by top AI laboratories. The soul figure is CEO Aravind Srinivas, born in 1994, from India. After completing his bachelor's and master's degrees at IIT Madras, he pursued a doctorate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley. He successively interned at DeepMind and Google Brain, and returned to OpenAI in 2021 to work as a research scientist. CTO Denis Yarats comes from Meta AI, and Johnny Ho, Chief Strategy Officer, is in charge of ranking and back-end systems.

Both of them are post-90s generation members. In fact, the company has another co-founder named Andy Konwinski, a member of the post-80s generation. As he is also the co-founder of Databricks, he is reported not to participate in the work on a full-time basis. The four people gathered together with a very simple initial idea: traditional search engines return a bunch of links, and users need to click in to filter information by themselves. Why not directly provide refined answers with sources attached? This idea was not favored when ChatGPT first became popular.

OpenAI was developing general large models, and Google had a search entrance with millions of users. Why could a startup break into this field? Perplexity chose a differentiated path: instead of training its own foundational models, it invokes and routes models from multiple vendors according to different tasks, and then performs RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) through real-time online retrieval. It can use other people's models and focus on retrieval and orchestration itself, featuring light assets and fast iteration. In December 2022, only one month after ChatGPT ignited the global generative AI wave, Perplexity, which was founded four months earlier, rolled out its product form.

It can directly retrieve information across the entire network, refine answers, and attach source links. This model was once regarded as a "Google killer", pushing Google out of its comfort zone. With this path proven feasible, the financing pace has also accelerated. S. dollars. S. dollars is not search, but a product called Perplexity Computer. On February 25, 2026, Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent product for professional users, which can automatically perform various complex work tasks on the computer end. It is reported that Perplexity Computer has formed direct competition with similar agent products from OpenAI and Anthropic.

This product has completely changed the company's growth curve. S. S. S. dollars at the beginning of 2026. In less than eight months, the revenue nearly tripled. The user scale is also considerable. Perplexity executives said that the monthly active users of its search and agent tools have exceeded 100 million, including tens of thousands of enterprise customers. Other data shows that the monthly active users have steadily stayed between 30 million and 45 million in 2026. From search to Agent, Perplexity has completed the most difficult leap on the AI track.

S. dollars valuation is NVIDIA. Jensen Huang once said in an interview that he uses Perplexity in his daily work. But the CEO's personal preference cannot explain an investment of billions of dollars. The underlying logic is that the more tasks Perplexity Computer performs and the longer it runs, the more computing power it consumes. As a result, Perplexity has transformed from a search company into a major computing power consumer, and NVIDIA can sell more chips. The cooperation between the two sides has already been launched. Perplexity has stated that it will use NVIDIA Vera central processing units to run agent-based AI queries, and has also signed a chip usage agreement with CoreWeave, a cloud service provider heavily supported by NVIDIA.

According to The Information, representatives of the two sides now meet multiple times a week to communicate on hardware and software development. Selling servers on one hand and investing in application entrances on the other, NVIDIA has bet in advance on the next round of computing power demand creators. This is NVIDIA's underlying logic. This strategy is not new. In 2024, NVIDIA began to negotiate investment with OpenAI. S. dollars in the construction of OpenAI's data centers, while OpenAI promised to purchase a large number of NVIDIA chips.

S. dollars to AI startup Inflection AI to obtain the license of its AI model and hire most of its employees. S. S. S. dollars worth of computing power resources from Microsoft Azure. The common pattern of these transactions is the deep integration of chip supply and equity investment. According to statistics from PitchBook, NVIDIA participated in nearly 67 venture capital transactions in 2025, higher than the 54 transactions in 2024. Many of these invested companies immediately used the money they received to buy NVIDIA GPUs. In March this year, NVIDIA took the lead in establishing the Nemotron Alliance, and a host of star teams including Perplexity, Mistral, Cursor, and Thinking Machines were brought into the same camp to share computing power and data.

S. S. S. dollars. This is essentially a disguised talent acquisition, aiming to accelerate the self-development of the open-source Nemotron series models. For Poolside, what NVIDIA wants to buy is technology and talents; for Perplexity, NVIDIA initially wanted to do the same, but finally turned to equity investment. Objectively speaking, this set of strategies also has hidden worries. How much of the money NVIDIA invested will eventually be converted into real chip purchases, and how much of it is just valuation bubble? Do these companies really have so many users requiring computing power, or is it because NVIDIA keeps investing that makes the demand look particularly strong?

Perplexity's financing speed is a typical capital myth. S. dollars in seed round financing. S. S. dollars. S. S. S. S. S. S. dollars. S. dollars, and football star Cristiano Ronaldo also joined as an investor at this time. Perplexity's investor list is extremely luxurious: industrial capitals including NVIDIA, SoftBank and Databricks are all gathered here; tech giants including Jeff Bezos, former Twitter vice president Elad Gil, and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman have made personal investments; even Jeff Dean, head of Google AI, and former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki are also on the list.

This investment from executives of competing companies is sufficient to prove its high quality. S. dollars, with undisclosed investors. S. dollars, representing a 200x surge in less than four years. S. dollars valuation when Series A investors entered, the return reached 200x in three and a half years. S. S. dollars valuation. S. S. dollars valuation implies a P/S ratio of about 40 times. S. S. S. S. 5 times. Perplexity's revenue growth rate is indeed more aggressive, tripling in 8 months. But a 40x P/S ratio can only be sustained if the revenue continues to grow exponentially.

But in fact, Perplexity does not develop its own foundational large models. Its Sonar model is fine-tuned based on Meta's Llama, and its core capabilities are built on multi-model routing and retrieval augmentation. Its highest-performing answers rely on third-party models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and xAI. Once these models raise prices or restrict access, Perplexity's cost structure will face pressure. Between these "suppliers", it is both a customer and a competitor. Fortunately, the emergence of Jensen Huang has just completed this puzzle.