We are excited to announce our investment in Perplexity, the AI-powered search company transforming the way people discover information online. Unlike traditional search engines that return lists of links, Perplexity delivers direct, conversational answers, citing relevant sources and continuously refining results in real time. Their product represents a fundamental shift and could eventually impact how billions of people interact with information online.
Perplexity is backed by top investors, including NEA, IVP, Bessemer, and Accel as well as leading strategics like Samsung, NVIDIA, and Databricks Ventures, among many others.
The search market today
Search has long been one of the most important and most lucrative businesses online. Today, the global search engine market is valued at more than $250 billion, and is projected to grow to $440 billion by 2030, representing a 11.8% compound annual growth rate. To better understand the scale of the market, just consider that:
- Search engines drive about 68% of all website traffic globally.
- Worldwide search advertising spend reached $351 billion in 2025 and is expected to generate 40% of all digital ad revenue in the US this year.
- Google handles more than 5 trillion search queries per year and generated $54 billion in revenue from its search engine in Q2 2025 alone.
Yet even in a market with a massive and dominant player, things are starting to change. In 2025, Google’s share of global search dipped below 90% for the first time in a decade, a sign of rising consumer demand for alternatives.
Perplexity’s opportunity
Perplexity is at the forefront of this change and is creating next-generation agentic AI products that rethink how people search, learn, and interact with information. The company’s growth since it was founded in 2022 has been staggering. Back in its earliest days, Perplexity handled just 3,000 queries a day. By August 2024, however, that number had surged to 230 million queries per month. In May 2025, CEO Aravind Srinivas reported the platform had reached 780 million monthly queries and said the company projects hitting 1 billion queries per week by the end of this year.
To help put this into perspective, keep in mind that even at that scale, Perplexity would still be only 1/100th the size of Google. Not only does that underscore just how big the search market is, it also illustrates how much room Perplexity has to grow its market share.
That growth is being accelerated by strategic partnerships around the world. Deals with Bharti Airtel (India), Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Softbank (Japan), and SK Telecom (South Korea), for example, are expanding the company’s reach across key international markets. Discussions with Samsung and others about pre-install opportunities could dramatically extend distribution. Meanwhile, the company’s launch of Comet, its AI-native web browser, positions Perplexity to compete more directly with incumbents by embedding agentic AI into the browsing experience itself.
As regulatory scrutiny of search intensifies, Perplexity may also benefit from anti-trust tailwinds, creating an opening reminiscent of how Apple capitalized on Microsoft’s dominance in the 1990s.
Why we like Perplexity
Perplexity stands out for its explosive growth, scaling nearly fivefold in the past year and tenfold since early 2024. It also has a world-class team that is recognized as one of the most influential in AI and that is building products that redefine how people search. The company also benefits from an exceptional investor syndicate.
In our view, this combination of momentum, talent, and financial support gives Perplexity a unique edge as it reshapes the future of search.
