Perplexity AI is a U.S. artificial intelligence company that operates a conversational search engine — a tool that answers questions in natural-language prose and displays citations to the underlying sources alongside each response, rather than returning a ranked list of links. The company is headquartered in San Francisco.
Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Srinivas, the CEO, previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI and at Google $GOOGL. The company's core product, also called Perplexity, allows users to type a question and receive a synthesized answer drawn from live web results, with numbered citations that readers can click through to verify. The product sits in a distinct category from both traditional search engines, which surface links, and standalone large language model chatbots, which generate text without consistent real-time sourcing.
The company offers a free tier and a paid subscription called Perplexity Pro, which provides access to more capable underlying AI models, including those built by third parties such as Anthropic and OpenAI. Perplexity does not build its own foundational AI models from scratch; instead it builds retrieval and reasoning infrastructure on top of existing models, differentiating itself primarily on search quality, speed, and source transparency.
Perplexity has attracted investment from a range of technology and venture capital backers and has grown into one of the more prominent independent AI application companies to emerge from the wave of generative AI development that followed the public release of large language models in the early 2020s. The company has discussed its longer-term path to a public market listing, with leadership citing 2028 as a target. Perplexity has also pursued commercial partnerships — including a deal with .