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The start-up could reach $3bn in valuation following the investment, but in recent weeks it has been marred with accusations of plagiarism.
Japanese investment firm Softbank is set to invest between $10m and $20m into US AI start-up Perplexity, according to a Bloomberg report.
The investment will be part of a larger funding round that could triple the start-up’s valuation, putting it at $3bn, a figure it was striving for earlier this year.
Founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity is a generative AI start-up with a chatbot-style interface in its platform, similar to that of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing.
Since it launched, it has received significant funding from major tech players. Six months after it was founded, the company raised a $25.6m Series A funding round, which included investments from former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and former Microsoft president Bob Muglia.
At the beginning of 2024, Perplexity scored $73.6m in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos.
Earlier this month, SoftBank announced a strategic partnership with Perplexity, allowing customers from across its three mobile brands to use Perplexity Pro – the platform’s premium version – for one year, free of charge.
Accusations of plagiarism
But while the $100m funding in less than two years shows Perplexity to be successfully riding the AI wave, it has also been caught up in the controversies that come with it.
Two weeks ago (11 June), Forbes published a report claiming that Perplexity had plagiarised its content, citing a particular story covered by the news site’s own journalists which was followed by an “extremely similar” piece published by Perplexity the next day.
“Perplexity had taken our work, without our permission, and republished it across multiple platforms – web, video, mobile – as though it were itself a media outlet,” the article read.
Speaking to Associated Press, co-founder and CEO Srinivas said the platform is “more of an aggregator of information” and that it “never ripped off content from anybody”.
Following the publication of its report, Axios reported that Forbes’ general counsel MariaRosa Cartolano sent a letter to the AI start-up accusing it of stealing text and images in a “wilful infringement” of the news company’s copyright.
The company has also come under scrutiny from Wired for allegedly ignoring a widely accepted web standard, the Robots Exclusion Protocol. This protocol allows website owners to exclude bots and web crawlers from accessing parts of their site.
Wired, and developer Robb Knight, conducted analysis, which suggested that Perplexity is ignoring the robots exclusion protocol to surreptitiously scrape areas of websites that operators do not want bots to access. The media site also claimed the platform was at times “summarising stories inaccurately and with minimal attribution”.
In response to questions from Wired, Srinivas said the media organisation’s questions reflect “a deep and fundamental misunderstanding of how Perplexity and the internet work”. However, he did not dispute the specifics of Knight and Wired’s findings.
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