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The move will enable Perplexity’s users to widen their 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 continue to 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, a Perplexity spokesperson said, “We’re excited to announce that we’ve acquired Carbon, a retrieval engine that connects external data sources to large language models.
“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 that ultimately tripled the start-up’s valuation.
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