After raising nearly $500 million in its fourth funding round in 2024, AI search company Perplexity is looking to expand its reach by venturing into the shopping space.
The AI startup has launched a shopping hub to attract users, in a bid to beef up its platform as it attempts to take on Alphabet-owned Google’s dominance in the search engine space. Perplexity had already been making waves as it tried to set itself apart from its competition, namely OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing, and Google’s Gemini AI by using multiple large language models to deliver more accurate and richer responses. And now, it is expanding its reach into the e-commerce market with its unique new features.
The firm, backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and leading AI chipmaker Nvidia, will offer users product cards showing relevant items in response to questions related to shopping.
READ: AI startup Perplexity nears $9 billion valuation amid copyright lawsuits from publishers (November 6, 2024)
E-commerce platforms have increasingly been focused on integrating AI in a bid to attract more merchants to their services, and Perplexity hopes to entice them by introducing their “Merchant Program” which will allow retailers to share product information with the company.
READ: AI startup Perplexity nears $9 billion valuation amid copyright lawsuits from publishers (November 6, 2024)
Perplexity’s new “Shopping Feature” will first launch in the United States and is later expected to expand into other markets. The search startup hopes to stand out with its “Snap to Shop” feature—a viAI search newcomer Perplexity looks to expand into shoppingsual search tool that shows products based on users’ photos of an item.
After its latest successful funding round, the company is valued at nearly $9 billion. Though it has not been smooth sailing for the fledgling company—Perplexity faced copyright infringement lawsuits from The New York Post and WSJ’s parent company Dow Jones. The legal claims highlighted Perplexity’s ability to provide answers to user queries based on web-scraped data which includes original reporting from the publications. The publications claimed that the AI startup had stolen traffic from their respective websites, by providing AI responses based on their original articles.
However, even mired in lawsuits, Perplexity does not seem to be slowing down. Launched in 2022, Perplexity was co-founded by Indian American Aravind Srinivas who previously held research-oriented roles at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. An IIT Madras alum with a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, Srinivas aims “to build the world’s most knowledge centric company.”