Perplexity AI, Inc.

Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded in August 2022 and is headquartered in San Francisco. Co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas previously worked as an AI researcher at OpenAI and at Alphabet subsidiaries DeepMind and Google Brain.

The company operates what it calls an "answer engine": a conversational search engine that uses large language models to answer search queries directly with sourced answers, rather than just returning a list of links. The founding idea grew out of the founders' shared frustration with traditional search engines' inability to provide direct answers that account for the full, nuanced context of a query.

On this platform, Perplexity is listed with the Perplexity MCP Server, which integrates the company's search and answer capabilities directly into AI clients and coding agents - letting AI agents retrieve current, web-based information with source citations without building their own search infrastructure.

Perplexity is one of the best-known examples of how generative AI is fundamentally changing traditional web search, putting it in direct competition with established search engines like Google as well as other AI answer services.

Since its founding, Perplexity has closed several large funding rounds and has at times been valued at several billion dollars - a sign of strong investor interest in AI-powered alternatives to Google search.