Nvidia in Talks to Back Perplexity at Over $30 Billion as Revenue Triples

The chipmaker is weighing a fresh stake in the AI search company after its run rate jumped past $750 million, pushing the startup toward a valuation more than half above last year's round.

Nvidia is in discussions to invest in Perplexity as part of an equity funding round that would value the artificial intelligence startup at more than $30 billion, according to a report published Sunday by The Information. People with knowledge of the talks said the round would lift Perplexity's valuation by more than half compared with its financing about a year ago.

Neither side has confirmed a completed deal.

Perplexity declined to comment on the report, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Reuters, which relayed the story, said it could not independently verify the details.

A valuation that keeps climbing

The proposed figure would extend one of the steepest re-ratings in the current AI cycle. Perplexity was valued at roughly $520 million when Nvidia first backed it in a January 2024 Series B round led by Institutional Venture Partners. By late 2024 the company had reached about $9 billion. A $500 million round led by Accel in mid-2025 pushed it near $14 billion, and by September 2025 it stood at $20 billion. Its Series E-6 round, which closed in January 2026, valued it at roughly $23 billion.

Across those rounds Perplexity has raised close to $1.7 billion. Its cap table reads like a directory of AI-era money, with stakes held by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SoftBank's Vision Fund 2, Accel, IVP, NEA, Databricks, and Bessemer Venture Partners, plus individual backers such as Shopify's Tobias Lütke and Figma's Dylan Field. Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo joined the roster in December 2025.

A round above $30 billion would take that climb further still.

The product behind the numbers

Much of the attention in the report centered on how fast the company's revenue has grown. Perplexity's annualized revenue has risen above $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of 2026, meaning its run rate has more than tripled in under a year.

A large share of that growth traces to Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent the company launched in February 2026. Instead of answering a single query, the agent breaks a goal into smaller tasks, assigns each to one of roughly 19 underlying models, and runs them in an isolated cloud environment with browser access and connections to hundreds of outside applications such as Slack and GitHub. It was offered first to subscribers on the company's $200-a-month Max tier before a broader rollout.

The agent moved onto desktops within months. Perplexity released a Mac version, branded Personal Computer, in March 2026, then brought it to Windows on July 28. On the desktop the software can read local files and act inside apps such as Word and Excel, positioning it against Microsoft's Copilot.

Nvidia's spread across the AI stack

A Perplexity check would fit a pattern Nvidia has followed throughout the boom. The chipmaker took part in more than 50 venture deals for AI companies in 2024, according to PitchBook data, and its pace has not slowed since. Its largest single commitment came in September 2025, when it agreed to invest as much as $100 billion in OpenAI.

The company had weighed other ways of working with Perplexity before the current talks. Those reportedly included a technology licensing arrangement and offers to hire some of the startup's staff. The conversation later shifted toward a direct equity stake.

For Nvidia, the logic is straightforward. Its investments buy exposure to the software being built on top of its chips, and they help keep the companies designing that software spending on its hardware.

The circular financing question

That last point is what has drawn criticism.

Detractors argue that Nvidia's strategy forms a loop, in which money the company puts into AI developers returns to it as revenue when those developers spend on its graphics processors. Investor Michael Burry and Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon have both flagged the dynamic, warning that it can make end demand look stronger than it is and deepen losses if AI spending cools.

Jensen Huang, Nvidia's chief executive, has rejected the framing, calling the idea ridiculous. Some fund managers side with him, describing the web of deals as a virtuous circle that lines up chip suppliers with the builders and customers racing to add computing capacity. Backers of the model also note that Nvidia's equity stakes stay small next to the roughly $200 billion in annual revenue the company now generates.

What comes next for Perplexity

Founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity built its name on an answer engine that responds to questions with cited sources rather than a page of links. It competes head-on with Google and OpenAI's ChatGPT, and increasingly with Microsoft's Copilot inside Windows, all of them larger and better funded.

The company has been assembling the infrastructure to stand on its own. In January 2026 it signed a three-year, $750 million agreement to run workloads on Microsoft's Azure cloud, its first major cloud commitment outside Amazon Web Services. The Azure deal lets Perplexity serve models from providers including OpenAI and Anthropic through Microsoft's Foundry service, though the company has said AWS remains its preferred infrastructure partner.

Its expansion has not been friction-free. Amazon sued Perplexity in November over an AI shopping feature, and the startup faces separate copyright complaints from news publishers including CNN and The New York Times.

Srinivas has said he is in no hurry to take the company public. In a June interview with CNBC he put Perplexity's IPO target at 2028, adding that it would proceed on that timeline regardless of how the market receives the debuts of OpenAI and Anthropic.