Perplexity AI records more than a million users in India

Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search startup Perplexity AI has more than a million users in India, co-founder Aravind Srinivas told Moneycontrol, reflecting the growing popularity of the service that has become the talk of the town in Silicon Valley in recent weeks.

"We want that number to expand to like 10-100X more because the Indian population is so big," Srinivas said in an interview. The answer engine, which aims to take on tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, currently has over 10 million active users across the world.

Srinivas said that the awareness of the Indian public to generative AI is quite good. "A lot of people are aware of ChatGPT and large language models...They are already using these technologies in creative ways," he said.

"So, I think we are going to see a lot more faster movement in the AI revolution in India compared to the previous web and mobile revolution, where we were a little behind the rest of the world," Srinivas said.

Founded in August 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity AI launched its answer engine in December 2022. The company recently raised $73.6 million in Series B funding at a valuation of $520 million from marquee investors, a list that includes Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.

Google's AI head Jeff Dean and former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki have also backed the company in a personal capacity. This investment brings the total funds raised by Perplexity AI to about $100 million to date.

Unlike traditional search engines, Perplexity AI offers a chatbot-like interface that allows users to ask any question and receive concise answers, backed up by a curated set of sources that are mentioned as citations. People can then ask follow-up questions or head over to the articles mentioned to dive deeper into that specific topic.

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