Perplexity: The $20B Startup That Bid $34.5B for Chrome
How a 31-year-old from Chennai built the only company that actually scares Google.
Aravind Srinivas grew up idolising Sundar Pichai (Google’s CEO)
Same hometown. Same dream. Same path to Silicon Valley.
One difference: Srinivas decided to compete with him.
Three years later, Perplexity is worth $20 billion. Srinivas is India’s youngest billionaire. And Google is scrambling to respond.
This is the story of how it happened.
Plus: the actual pitch decks Perplexity used to raise from Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and the best VCs in the world.
The Numbers
Before the story, the scale:
Valuation: $20 billion (September 2025)
Total Raised: $1.3 billion across 9 rounds
ARR: ~$200 million (approaching)
Perplexity ARR nearing $200M as monetization accelerates Monthly Users: 45 million
Monthly Queries: 780 million
Employees: ~250
Founded: August 2022
Valuation Growth: $500M → $20B in 20 months = 40x
This is one of the fastest value creation stories in AI history.
The Origin Story
Aravind Srinivas was born in Chennai in 1994.
His mother used to point at IIT Madras and say: “This is where you’re going to study.”
He delivered. Graduated top of his computer science class.
Then UC Berkeley for a PhD. Then internships at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind.
During his DeepMind internship in London, Srinivas slept at the office. His rental was terrible. But the office had a library.
One night, he found a book called “In the Plex” — about Google’s founding.
He read it multiple times.
Two Stanford PhD students built Google. Srinivas was halfway through his Berkeley PhD. The math clicked.
“That changed my whole understanding of startups.”
The Founding
August 2022. Srinivas left OpenAI.
Weeks before ChatGPT launched. Nobody knew the AI explosion was coming.
He recruited three co-founders:
Denis Yarats (CTO) — Meta AI researcher
Johnny Ho (CSO) — Quora engineer, former quant trader
Andy Konwinski — Databricks co-founder
December 7, 2022 — seven days after ChatGPT launched — Perplexity went live.
Same week. Different approach.
ChatGPT was a chatbot. Perplexity was an “answer engine.”
ChatGPT pulled from training data. Perplexity searched the web in real-time.
ChatGPT hallucinated. Perplexity cited sources.
“We’re replacing the search engine with an answer engine.”
Silicon Valley noticed.
The Funding Trajectory
This is where it gets absurd:
Round Date Valuation Seed 2022 ~$9M Series A March 2023 $121M Series B January 2024 $520M Series B Extension April 2024 $1B Series C August 2024 $3B Series C Extension January 2025 $9B Series D June 2025 $14B Latest September 2025 $20B
$9M → $20B in three years.
That’s a 2,222x valuation increase.
The Investors
Institutional:
Accel (led $500M round)
IVP
SoftBank Vision Fund 2
Nvidia
NEA
Bessemer Venture Partners
Databricks
Strategic/Angel:
Jeff Bezos
Yann LeCun (Meta Chief AI Scientist)
Jeff Dean (Google Chief Scientist)
Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO)
Tobias Lütke (Shopify founder)
Cristiano Ronaldo (December 2025)
Google’s own Chief AI Scientist invested in Perplexity.
Let that sink in.
The Product Evolution
2022-2023: Answer Engine
Simple premise: ask a question, get an answer with sources.
No link spam. No SEO garbage. Just the answer.
2024: Expansion
Perplexity Pages — generates structured reports
Shopping Hub — AI product recommendations (backed by Amazon + Nvidia)
Finance Features — real-time stock data
Pro Subscription — $20/month for power users
2025: Platform Play
Comet Browser — AI-native browser built on Chromium
Perplexity Assistant — multi-modal, performs tasks across apps
Search API — developer access to their search infrastructure
Max Subscription — $200/month for unlimited everything
The browser is the key.
Srinivas calls Comet a “cognitive operating system.”
It’s not just search. It’s an AI that lives in your browser, summarizes pages, compares tabs, automates workflows, sends emails.
This is the real Google threat.
The Audacity Moves
Move 1: TikTok Bid (January 2025)
The day before TikTok’s US ban deadline, Perplexity submitted a merger proposal.
Valued at up to $50 billion.
It didn’t happen. But it made headlines.
Move 2: Chrome Bid (August 2025)
Perplexity offered $34.5 billion for Google Chrome.
Their valuation at the time: $18 billion.
They bid more than they were worth.
Chrome has 3.5 billion users. 68% browser market share.
Perplexity promised:
Keep Chrome open source
Keep Google as default search
Invest $3B in Chromium over 24 months
Industry reaction: “publicity stunt” or “genius antitrust play” depending on who you asked.
Either way, everyone talked about it.
“Attention is all you need.”
The Business Model
Revenue Streams:
Subscriptions (primary) — Free, Pro ($20/mo), Max ($200/mo)
Advertising — contextual ads in “related questions”
Enterprise — Perplexity Enterprise Pro
API — Search API for developers
E-commerce — Shopping Hub transactions
Revenue Growth:
Mid-2024: $35M ARR
End of 2024: $63M ARR
March 2025: $100M ARR
June 2025: $148M ARR
September 2025: ~$200M ARR
Target: $656M by end of 2026
That’s 3x growth needed in 15 months. Aggressive but trackable.
The Publisher Problem (and Solution)
Perplexity faced backlash.
Publishers accused them of scraping content without permission.
Lawsuits from:
Dow Jones & New York Post
BBC (threatened)
New York Times (cease and desist)
Condé Nast
Forbes
Nikkei & Asahi Shimbun
Cloudflare confirmed Perplexity used “stealth crawlers” to bypass robots.txt.
Not a good look.
Perplexity’s response: The Publisher Program.
80% of revenue to publishers
20% to Perplexity
$42.5 million pool allocated
300+ partners signed up
Partners include: Time, Fortune, Der Spiegel, Gannett, The Independent, LA Times.
“Perplexity only succeeds if journalism succeeds.”
First AI company to actually pay creators at scale.
Why It Might Actually Work
Google’s problem:
Google makes $260B/year from search ads. Their incentive is showing you links, not answers.
AI Overviews hurt their core business. They’re conflicted.
Perplexity’s advantage:
No legacy. No ad business to protect. Pure answer engine from day one.
The numbers:
Google: 8.5B searches/day
Perplexity: 30M queries/day
Perplexity is 0.35% of Google’s volume.
But growing at 800% YoY. With 45M users. And a browser now.
If they capture even 5% of search intent, that’s a $50B+ business.
What To Learn From Perplexity
1. Timing Matters
Srinivas left OpenAI weeks before ChatGPT launched. Lucky? Maybe. But he was positioned.
2. Differentiation Over Competition
He didn’t build a better chatbot. He built an answer engine. Different category.
3. Audacity As Strategy
Bid for TikTok. Bid for Chrome. Most won’t succeed. All create attention.
4. Speed Beats Scale
250 employees vs Google’s 190,000. Moving faster matters more than headcount.
5. Fix Your Own Problems
Srinivas was frustrated with search as a researcher. He built what he needed.
The Decks That Raised $1.5 Billion
Now the good part.
Below the paywall: Perplexity’s actual pitch decks from 2023 and 2024.
Most founders never see how $20B companies actually pitch.
These decks show:
How to position against a monopoly
How to evolve narrative as you grow
How to turn controversy into strategy
What VCs actually fund at different stages
Perplexity’s Pitch Decks: 2023 + 2024
How a $9M Startup Became Worth $20B
Below: the actual decks Perplexity used to raise from Bezos, Nvidia, Accel, and SoftBank:
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