In August 2025 a startup less than three years old offered $34.5 billion for Google Chrome. Almost nobody thought it would be accepted. That was not really the point. Perplexity wanted to be seen as the kind of company that could ask.
Aravind Srinivas is its chief executive. He had worked in research at OpenAI and Google DeepMind before starting the company on 22 August 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, AI and machine learning. His birthplace and schooling are not in the sources read for this profile; he is widely reported to be from Chennai and to have studied at IIT Madras and Berkeley, which should be checked before publication.
Srinivas said the feature had rough edges and that Perplexity only aggregates.
The product was simple to explain. Ask a question, get a written answer with citations. It launched on 7 December 2022, a week after ChatGPT, and by February 2023 reported two million unique visitors. In January 2024 it raised $73.6 million at a $520 million valuation, with Nvidia and Jeff Bezos among the investors. By December 2024 the valuation was $9 billion, and by September 2025, $20 billion.
The growth came with a bill. In June 2024 Forbes accused Perplexity of copying its reporting. Srinivas said the feature had rough edges and that Perplexity only aggregates. Then the lawsuits arrived: Dow Jones and the New York Post, three Japanese newspaper groups, Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Reddit, and in May 2026 CNN. In August 2025 Cloudflare said Perplexity's crawlers disguised themselves to get past blocks. Perplexity called that a publicity stunt.
The company kept moving. It launched the Comet browser in July 2025, made it free that October, and bid for TikTok's US business in January 2025. In January 2026 it signed a three-year, $750 million deal with Microsoft for access to models from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI. In February 2026 it dropped its advertising plans to focus on subscriptions, citing user trust, and launched Perplexity Computer, a general-purpose agent.
Perplexity's position is strange. It depends on other companies' models, sources its answers from publishers who are suing it, and competes with Google, which it also wants to buy parts of. Early 2026 brought a valuation of about $21 billion. Revenue has not been published in the sources read.
The lesson is about speed and exposure. Perplexity shipped fast, borrowed what it could, and got big before the rules were settled. That works until the people whose work you use start sending letters. The next test is whether it can build something it owns.