Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity has added three new advisors.
Among them is Emil Michael, Uber's former chief business officer. Rich Miner, co-founder of Android and consultant to Google; and former Bing CEO Mikhail Perkhan, according to a Thursday (May 16) LinkedIn post by Perplexity co-founder and CEO Arvind Srinivas.
The three new advisors will help the AI startup “in search, mobile and distribution,” Srinivas said in the post.
Srinivas added that Michael will lead Perplexity's growth, business and distribution strategies. Miner will help the company anticipate user trends and create a more intuitive interface. And Parakhin will help it develop its core response engine, in-house search infrastructure and AI capabilities.
Perplexity, which aims to compete with Google's search engine, raised $63 million in a funding round in April that valued the AI startup at $1 billion — a figure it has now surpassed this year. Doubled the price up to
The company's AI chatbot summarizes search results, offers quotes for answers and helps users refine their questions for the best answers.
Bloomberg reported in April that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said he uses Perplexity's products “almost every day.”
Srinivas told Bloomberg at the time: “We want to be upset at the hands of every single company in the United States.”
The company's AI-native search interface that displays quotes and images in its answers has helped it gain traction. It currently has 10 million monthly active users.
Perplexity is one of many tech companies looking to capitalize on an anticipated behavioral shift in the way people access information online — with the goal of making web searches more intelligent and streamlined.
Srinivas said in a January blog post that the company's unique advantage in streamlining search for users comes from using AI to provide direct answers to search queries rather than web links.
“Times spent sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links and multiple web pages will be replaced by more efficient ways of consuming and sharing information, enabling our society to accelerate learning and research,” Srinivas said in the post. will lead to a new era of