Nvidia is reportedly discussing participating in a new funding round for artificial intelligence (AI) search startup Perplexity. If the round goes through, Perplexity's valuation is expected to top $30 billion (about 41.5 trillion won), more than 50% higher than a year ago.
U.S. IT outlet The Information reported on the 23rd, citing multiple sources, that Nvidia is discussing taking part in Perplexity's new equity funding round. The total size of the round is said to be in the billions of dollars. Perplexity declined to comment and Nvidia did not respond immediately.
Perplexity was valued at $20 billion during a fundraising process in September last year. If the current round closes at a valuation above $30 billion, its valuation will have risen by more than 50% in about a year.
Revenue is also growing quickly. According to The Information, Perplexity's annualized revenue has more than tripled, from under $250 million (about 350 billion won) early this year to over $750 million (about 1.04 trillion won) recently.
Perplexity has grown as a service that answers users' questions with AI while presenting sources verified through web search. Rather than training its own AI model from scratch, it links and uses an appropriate model from among externally developed AI models depending on the task. Following its search service, it is expanding into AI agents and selling access rights to AI models developed by other companies.
Nvidia had considered licensing some of Perplexity's technology for billions of dollars and hiring some employees, but later shifted the discussion toward a conventional equity investment approach.
Nvidia has recently been striking deals to license AI startups' technology and hire key developers. It applied a similar approach to AI inference chip company Groq and networking chip company Enfabrica. Instead of acquiring corporations outright, it secures technology usage rights and development talent.
More recently, it also signed a $6 billion (about 8.3 trillion won) technology licensing agreement with AI startup Poolside. Nvidia secured technology that Poolside uses to develop AI models and offered jobs to about 100 developers. Separately, it decided to invest $1 billion (about 1.4 trillion won) in Poolside. Poolside's development staff are expected to be assigned to Nvidia's open-weight AI model "Nemotron."
Business collaboration between Nvidia and Perplexity is also expanding. In March, Perplexity joined the "Nemotron Coalition," which Nvidia launched to develop open AI models. Representatives of the two companies are said to be meeting several times a week for hardware and software development.
Perplexity also plans to use Nvidia's next-generation central processing unit (CPU), "Vera," for AI agent tasks. Perplexity said last month that it plans to adopt Vera, and earlier signed a deal to use Nvidia chips through CoreWeave, a cloud company invested in by Nvidia.
Nvidia has already invested in Perplexity several times. To date, Perplexity has raised more than $1.7 billion from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Accel and SoftBank, among others. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has said he is considering an initial public offering (IPO) in 2028.