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4 months ago
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Perplexity launched in Dec 2022, and it was deemed a “Google killer.”
By March 2023, just four months after launch, Perplexity reported 2 million monthly active users. Their early success was largely driven by word-of-mouth and social media buzz on platforms like X.
Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey even tweeted about it. This drove significant traffic and helped Perplexity overcome its “cold start” problem.
In early 2024, Perplexity was gaining serious momentum. Its user base hit 10 million monthly active users (MAU).
Perplexity would rapidly grow at a valuation of $1 billion in just 2 years.
The company’s rapid rise attracted major investor attention, like Jeff Bezos and Nvidia.
By May 2025, Perplexity had reached 15 million monthly active users and a $9 billion valuation after raising $500 million in December 2024.
The company was founded in early 2022 by Aravind Srinivas (former OpenAI researcher), Denis Yarats (former Meta AI researcher), Johnny Ho (former Quora engineer), and Andy Konwinski (co-founder of Databricks).
The founders wanted to build a “conversational answer engine” — a tool that doesn’t just give links like Google, but provides direct, cited answers powered by large language models (LLMs).
