SoftBank Group’s (OTCPK:SFTBY) Vision Fund 2 will invest between $10M and $20M in the U.S.-based artificial intelligence search startup — Perplexity AI, Bloomberg reported.
The investment is part of a larger $250M funding round, which values the startup at about $3B, tripling its earlier valuation of about $1B.
The deal is not yet finalized, and the terms could still change, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The less than two-year-old startup could be a potential rival to Alphabet’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) Google. The search startup calls itself an “answer engine” as instead of offering links, it presents results in text format.
California-based Perplexity AI raised about $74M in January from a group of investors, including Nvidia (NVDA) and Amazon’s (AMZN) Jeff Bezos, at a valuation of $540M, up from $121M in April 2023.
Softbank’s (OTCPK:SFTBY) current investment builds on an existing relationship with Perplexity AI as this year the startup offered SoftBank’s (OTCPK:SFTBY) Japanese wireless customers a free one-year subscription to its service.
SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) founder and CEO Masayoshi Son is picking up pace around AI developments. This year, the group parked ~$200M in healthcare AI with Tempus AI IPO.
Additionally, SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) is developing the Izanagi initiative, which aims to invest about $100B in AI-related technologies.
More on SoftBank Group
Source link
