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AnonTechie [soylentnews.org] writes:

At a recent AI conference in San Francisco, over 300 founders and investors were asked a provocative question: which billion-dollar AI startup would you bet against? The answer was surprising. Perplexity AI topped the list, with OpenAI coming in second. While the OpenAI vote raised eyebrows given its market dominance, the Perplexity verdict reveals something deeper about the AI search landscape in 2025.

Perplexity Founded in 2022, the company hit a $20 billion valuation by September 2025, processing 780 million queries monthly with over 30 million active users. Impressive on paper, but the company has raised nearly $1.5 billion in funding, with valuations jumping from $500 million to $20 billion in just 18 months. Fundraising rounds roughly every two months suggests either extraordinary growth or growing desperation to prove the business model works.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Perplexity is increasingly looking like what Silicon Valley dreads most a wrapper. The company initially had a competitive edge when it pioneered AI powered web search with real time information. But that advantage has evaporated faster than anyone expected.

[...] The AI bubble will eventually deflate. When it does, wrappers built on vanity metrics and unsustainable unit economics will be the first to go. Perplexity’s 360 million “free users” in India won’t save them when those users discover that ChatGPT and Google do the same thing for free and they don’t need to pay ₹17,000 for the privilege.

MEDIUM.COM [medium.com]

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