Perplexity AI

Facts

founded

August 2022, by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinskisource, accessed 2026-08-28

headquarters

San Francisco, Californiasource, accessed 2026-08-28

valuation

US$21.21 billion, after a Series E-6 round in early 2026source, accessed 2026-08-28

underlying models

Sonar is based on Meta's Llama; the product also routes to models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Moonshot AIsource, accessed 2026-08-28

reasoning model base

"a premier reasoning model powered by DeepSeek R1 with Chain of Thought"source, accessed 2026-08-28

input token definition

"Prompt tokens (user prompt) + Citation tokens (these are processed tokens from running searches)"source, accessed 2026-08-28

crawling finding

Cloudflare reported in August 2025 that Perplexity used undeclared "stealth" web crawlers to bypass web application firewalls and ignored robots.txtsource, accessed 2026-08-28