- Comet Special FinancingUSD 200M — Amount: USD 200M; Post-money valuation: ~USD 20B; Led by: Undisclosed | ⚠️ Valuation is lower than the USD 22.6B in Jan 2026, but multiple sources explicitly state this is not a formal down round, but rather pricing differences due to varying investor terms and round structures. This page treats it accordingly and does not mark it as a down round. Clarifying a common misconception regarding use of funds: This money is not to make Comet free—Comet has been globally free since Oct 2, 2025. Funds are used to expand Comet's distribution scale and enterprise-level Computer integration, aiming to secure browser entry points before Google Chrome integrates Gemini and OpenAI launches ChatGPT Atlas. Strategic logic...
- Angel RoundUndisclosed — Amount: Not disclosed; Post-money valuation: USD 22.6B; Led by Cristiano Ronaldo. The most unusual entry on this page. Football star CR7 invested personally, amount undisclosed, with a post-money valuation of USD 22.6B. This is not a standard financial investment but an equity arrangement tied to platform partnership—Perplexity gains distribution channels via one of the world's top personal IPs (CR7 has >1B social media followers). This continues Perplexity's 'celebrity shareholder' strategy (previously including Jeff Bezos, Tobi Lütke, Dylan Field, Naval Ravikant, etc.). For a company trying to crack open the search market dominated by Google, distribution channels are scarcer than capital. | Source: Trac
- Series E Final CloseUSD 200M — Amount: USD 200M; Post-money valuation: USD 20B; Led by: Undisclosed | Valuation officially broke through USD 20B. Starting from USD 121–150M in March 2023, this represents approximately 150x growth over 30 months—the fastest valuation climb in AI search company history. During the same period, ARR grew from near zero to approximately USD 200M (September 2025), resulting in a valuation/ARR multiple of about 100x. | Source: Tracxn / Axis Intelligence
- Series E ExtensionUSD 100M — Amount: USD 100M; Post-money valuation: USD 18B; Led by: No single lead investor identified | Extension tranche of Series E, valuation rose from USD 14B to USD 18B (+29% in 2 months). NVIDIA followed on investment again—this is its fifth consecutive appearance across B, C, D, E, and E-extension rounds, making it Perplexity's most frequent strategic investor across rounds. | Source: Tracxn
- SeriesEUSD 500M — Amount: USD 500M; Post-money valuation: USD 14B; Led by Accel | Valuation rose from USD 9B to USD 14B. Accel's lead investment is the core information of this round—as a veteran fund that invested in Facebook, Slack, and Dropbox, Accel's entry means Perplexity is viewed as a next-generation platform-level company. In the same month (Aug 2025), Perplexity made an industry-shocking move: bidding USD 34.5B for Google Chrome as a potential remedy in the US DOJ antitrust case against Google. This offer, far exceeding its own valuation, was essentially a strategic declaration competing for the "browser entry point." | Source: Tracxn / Public reports
- SeriesDUSD 500M — Amount: USD 500M; Post-money valuation: USD 9B; Led by IVP | Valuation rose from USD 3B to USD 9B (3x), just 4 months after the previous round. T. Rowe Price joined this round—another mainstream mutual fund, marking Perplexity's investor structure evolving from VC + angels toward long-term funds oriented towards public markets, which is typically seen as a signal of IPO preparation. Four rounds were completed in 2024 (B, B-1, C, D), with valuation rising from USD 520M to USD 9B (17x), one of the most intensive private tech company revaluations in history. | Source: Tracxn / Revenue Memo
- SeriesCUSD 250M — Amount: USD 250M; Post-money valuation: USD 3B; Led by: SoftBank Vision Fund. SoftBank Vision Fund led the round, with valuation tripling from USD 1B to USD 3B in four months. Two new investor types emerged: telecom operator CVCs—Wayra (Telefónica) and T.Capital (Deutsche Telekom) both entered, reflecting European telcos' defensive positioning against AI search potentially disrupting traffic entry points. Yann LeCun's personal investment is also notable—as Meta's Chief AI Scientist investing in a competitor to Meta is rare in the industry. Source: Tracxn / Revenue Memo
- SeriesB-1Undisclosed — Amount range: USD 62.7M–USD 63M; Post-money valuation: approx. USD 1B; Led by Daniel Gross | Officially crossed the USD 1B unicorn threshold, just 19 months after seed round. Lead investor Daniel Gross is one of the most active individual investors in AI (later joined Meta with Nat Friedman). Investor list reads like an "AI Who's Who": Andrej Karpathy (ex-Tesla AI Director, OpenAI co-founder), Jakob Uszkoreit (co-author of Transformer paper), Lip-Bu Tan (Cadence CEO), Stanley Druckenmiller
- SeriesBUSD 74M — Amount: USD 73.6M; Post-money valuation: USD 520M; Led by IVP | NVIDIA entered for the first time, joining Jeff Bezos in the same round—this is the most noteworthy structural change to record. NVIDIA's motivation aligns with its investments in xAI, CoreWeave, and Cohere: locking in customers at the equity level for future inference compute demand. Bezos invested personally (not through Amazon or Bezos Expeditions) and continued to follow-on in subsequent rounds. This round also gathered numerous tech founders and angels: Shopify CEO, Vercel CEO, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan—such a dense structure of 'founder-investors' typically appears when products have not yet been mainstreamed
- Series A ExtensionUndisclosed — Amount: Undisclosed; Post-money valuation: USD 500M; Led by: IVP | Only 7 months after Series A, valuation rose from USD 121-150M to USD 500M (~3.3x). Amount undisclosed. This was the first valuation re-rating following the global AI boom triggered by ChatGPT. IVP entered here and became a stable participant in subsequent rounds. | Source: Tracxn
- SeriesAUSD 29M — Amount: USD 28.8M (Tracxn); USD 25.6M (Revenue Memo/The Codew); Range USD 25.6–28.8M; Post-money valuation: USD 150M (Tracxn); USD 121M (Revenue Memo); Led by: New Enterprise Associates (NEA) | First introduction of mainstream VC. The investor list has a 'Silicon Valley Hall of Fame' flavor: Susan Wojcicki (former YouTube CEO), Paul Buchheit (creator of Gmail), Bob Muglia (former Microsoft executive)—this group's understanding of search products is Perplexity's hidden asset. Databricks' entry (strategic investment) also...
- Seed RoundUSD 3M — Amount scope: USD 3.1M; Led by: Elad Gil, Nat Friedman (co-led) | Special nature of founding team lineup: All four co-founders come from top AI institutions—Aravind Srinivas worked at OpenAI, Google Brain, DeepMind; Denis Yarats is an RL researcher at NYU; Andy Konwinski is Databricks co-founder; Johnny Ho is from Quora. Seed round investors are almost entirely AI insiders (Hugging Face CEO, Replit CEO, Berkeley professors), a typical 'insiders bet first' structure. | Source: Tracxn / Revenue
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