Thought Leadership
The AI-supported search engine start-up Perplexity AI is aiming for an IPO in 2028 and has set itself ambitious sales targets. As CEO and co-founder Aravind Srinivas explained in an interview with Handelsblatt, the company aims to achieve an annual recurring turnover of one billion US dollars by 2026.
Three years until the IPO
Since its foundation in 2022, Perplexity has positioned itself as one of the leading AI-powered search engines. The company relies on natural language queries and generative AI to produce search results that are designed to be significantly more informative and accurate than traditional search engine results.
Perplexity’s business model is currently based on two main sources of income: On the one hand, private users pay subscription fees of around 20 dollars a month for extended functions. Secondly, the company generates revenue from corporate customers who pay to use the Perplexity interfaces. Well-known companies such as Zoom and Hewlett Packard have already integrated the AI technology into their own offerings.
Now the stock market is also interesting for the young company. “We want to give ourselves at least three more years until the IPO,” Srinivas explained to Handelsblatt. Until then, Perplexity is aiming to achieve a positive EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) – an important indicator for potential investors. The targeted tenfold increase in turnover within just two years shows how strongly the management believes in its own growth potential.
Perplexity is also currently in early talks to raise between 500 million and 1 billion dollars in funding, as reported by CNBC,
Merger plans with Tiktok
It is also worth mentioning Perplexity’s interest in a merger with the US part of the video platform Tiktok. Srinivas confirmed that his company had already submitted a corresponding offer in January. A decision on this is still pending, as the negotiations involve both Tiktok’s parent company ByteDance and the US government.
Perplexity’s plan is to develop a specialized AI algorithm for Tiktok that upgrades the app’s internal search to a full-fledged search engine. Currently, the search is still very cumbersome and could definitely use improvement. Even if the merger does not go ahead, Srinivas remains optimistic: “Whoever wins would definitely benefit from our help,” emphasized the founder. He believes that cooperation with the future co-owner of Tiktok makes sense in any case.
