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The move will enable Perplexity’s AI platform to widen its reach and connect to apps such as Notion and Google Docs.
AI-powered conversational search engine Perplexity has announced the acquisition of Carbon, a US start-up that operates as a universal retrieval engine for LLMs to access unstructured data from any source. This comes after Perplexity saw its valuation rise to more than $9bn after its latest funding round.
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, Perplexity was established in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho, Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski and works by using large language models and web resources to answer questions in real time.
Perplexity will work with the entire Carbon team in order to fully integrate new data connectors into the existing tech stack and have stated that the acquisition of Carbon will enable “Perplexity’s answer engine to be informed by diverse sources of information, whether that data resides in internal databases, cloud storage or document repositories”.
This is the organisation’s second acquisition as it previously acquired Spellwise, an AI powered keyboard writer for iOS, a move which allowed the company to further develop its mobile applications.
In a statement, Perplexity said it was excited to acquire Carbon. “Soon, we’ll integrate Carbon’s data connectors into our tech stack, allowing users to connect apps like Notion and Google Docs directly to Perplexity. As part of the acquisition, we’re excited to welcome all members of the Carbon team to Perplexity to expedite our roadmap and ship new features faster.”
In June of this year, Japanese investment firm Softbank announced that it would be investing between $10m and $20m into Perplexity as part of a larger funding round of $500m that ultimately tripled the start-up’s valuation.
The start-up’s rapid rise has not been without controversy. A report from Forbes in the summer claimed that Perplexity had plagiarised its content, while Wired alleged that the start-up ignored a standard web protocol that allows website owners to exclude bots and web crawlers from accessing parts of their site.
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