PerplexityGrowth

Perplexity AI, Inc. is a San Francisco company launched in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. Its product is a retrieval-augmented answer engine: a query is turned into web searches, the retrieved pages are passed to a large language model, and the model writes a short answer with numbered citations to the sources. Its two published patent applications describe that surrounding system rather than a model: WO 2025/194127 'Augmented search engine' (priority March 14, 2024) and US 2025/0363097 'Compact search client for augmented search' (priority May 23, 2024). Both are pending, no granted patent was found, and Srinivas, Yarats and Ho are among the named inventors.

The company's own model work is a layer trained on top of open weights. On October 4, 2023 it opened pplx-api, serving open-source models including Mistral 7B and Llama 2. On February 11, 2025 it released a new version of Sonar, described in its announcement as built on Meta's Llama 3.3 70B and further trained for answer factuality and readability, served on Cerebras hardware; the company says it runs at 1,200 tokens per second and scored higher on user satisfaction than comparable models in its own A/B tests. Its published systems research concerns serving rather than modelling: 'fabric-lib: RDMA Point-to-Point Communication for LLM Systems' (arXiv, October 2025; MLSys 2026 proceedings), by four Perplexity authors, describes a portable RDMA library for disaggregated inference, mixture-of-experts routing and reinforcement-learning weight updates across NVIDIA ConnectX-7 and AWS EFA network cards, open-sourced as pplx-garden.

Perplexity Pages, which turns research into a shareable article, launched May 30, 2024. Deep Research, which the company says runs dozens of searches and writes a report, launched February 14, 2025. Comet, a web browser with the assistant built in, launched July 9, 2025 for subscribers of the $200-a-month Max plan and became free worldwide on October 2, 2025. Perplexity Patents, a patent-search agent, launched October 30, 2025. On February 25, 2026 the company introduced Perplexity Computer, an orchestration layer that breaks a task into sub-tasks and routes them to third-party models; at launch it named Anthropic's Opus 4.6 as the core reasoning engine, with Google, xAI and OpenAI models for specific sub-tasks. On August 13, 2026 the company announced that its Sonar API endpoints would retire on September 27, 2026 in favour of a new Agent API.

Dependence on retrieved web content has produced legal exposure: Dow Jones and the New York Post sued in New York on October 21, 2024; Nikkei and the Asahi Shimbun sued in Tokyo on August 26, 2025; and Reddit sued in New York on October 22, 2025. Perplexity has denied Reddit's allegations. Perplexity has made five small acquisitions, none with a disclosed price: Spellwise, an iOS keyboard app (September 2023); Carbon, a data-connector layer for linking apps such as Notion and Google Docs to the engine (December 2024); Read.cv, a professional-profile network that was wound down (January 2025); Invisible, an agent-infrastructure team assigned to Comet (agreement announced August 2025); and the team of the design tool Visual Electric, whose product was shut down (October 2025).