AI-powered search engine Perplexity has announced a strategic partnership on Monday with Japanese investment holdings company SoftBank to launch Perplexity Enterprise Pro for corporate customers in Japan.
This distribution agreement leverages SoftBank’s enterprise sales team to scale Perplexity’s presence across Japanese corporations. SoftBank, as one of Japan’s leading technology infrastructure providers, provides Perplexity Enterprise Pro with an opportunity to penetrate into the country’s corporate market.
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“SoftBank has signed an agreement with Perplexity to be an authorized reseller of Perplexity Enterprise Pro and deploy their 7,000-member sales team to scale Perplexity’s adoption in Japan,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas took to LinkedIn to share the partnership announcement.
“This comes after internally adopting Perplexity and evaluating it against other tools,” he added.
The relationship between Perplexity and SoftBank goes a long way, with Softbank investing in Perplexity in 2024 at a $3 billion valuation. The investment company seems to take a special interest in AI-related firms. SoftBank has previously invested $25 billion in AI giant OpenAI, and also backed other massive AI projects in the U.S. like the Stargate Project in collaboration with Oracle and OpenAI.
The news comes amid talks of Perplexity merging with Elon Musk’s Grok.
SoftBank’s relationships with Japanese enterprises across finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology sectors will help San Francisco-based Perplexity overcome market entry barriers that would otherwise challenge foreign AI companies. Through their “turn-key solution system” approach to enterprise digitalization, SoftBank has established trusted advisory relationships with companies looking to modernize their operations.
According to Perplexity, implementing Perplexity Enterprise Pro would help Japanese businesses use AI-driven search to transform how corporate teams access and utilize information. These enterprises will join over 7,000 organizations currently using Perplexity Enterprise Pro, including big names like Nvidia, Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, and Snowflake, collectively executing nearly 20 million queries daily.
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Several new features had been recently added to Perplexity Enterprise Pro, including Deep Research, which allows users to conduct complex research with greater depth and precision, an enhanced security hub, and the ability to connect premium data and internal knowledge bases. Perplexity claims that Enterprise Pro allows businesses to benefit from improved data privacy, enhanced security, user management, SOC2 certification, data retention, and single-sign on (SSO).
Perplexity’s deal with SoftBank for expansion into Japan is the latest in the AI firm’s attempts towards global expansion. Perplexity has also partnered with South Korea’s SK Telecom, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, France’s Bouygues Telecom to expand into South Korea, Germany, and France respectively.