By Rajwa Quasim
The U.S.-based chipmaker Nvidia is in talks to invest in AI-powered search engine startup Perplexity. According to The Information, the deal is part of Nvidia’s equity funding that would value Perplexity at more than $30 billion.
The funding would increase Perplexity’s valuation by more than 50% from its previous financing round. In September 2025, the company closed a $200 million funding round at a $20 billion valuation.
The talks come as Perplexity’s business has expanded rapidly. The AI startup’s annualized revenue has increased to more than $750 million, up from $250 million at the beginning of the year. Much of the growth has been linked to Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based autonomous AI agent platform that acts as a digital co-worker and executes complex, multi-step projects from a single natural-language prompt.
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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC, “The AI company is planning to go public in 2028 regardless of how the market receives the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI. […] I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they’re doing well.”
“By consistently holding 2028 as our earliest date for an IPO, Perplexity has been able to build a healthy, high-growth business,” Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told Reuters.
Nvidia has increasingly invested in companies that use the AI infrastructure and technology it supplies. Last month, Perplexity said it planned to use Nvidia’s new Vera CPUs for AI-agent workloads after finding that the chips significantly outperformed traditional server processors for some of its core tasks.
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According to Reuters, earlier this year, Perplexity entered into a $750 million deal with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud services. Under the deal, Perplexity will be able to access and run several AI models through Microsoft’s Foundry platform, including models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI.
In July, Nvidia unveiled a new AI model and announced partnerships with Japanese industrial giants including Fujitsu, Hitachi, Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric and Kawasaki Heavy Industries to expand the physical AI ecosystem in Japan. The new model, Cosmos 3 Edge, known as a “world model,” is designed to help systems perceive and navigate physical environments in real time and learn from a wider range of inputs than large language models (LLMs).
Nvidia has also announced a $1 billion investment in an AI project by South Korean internet company Naver.