‘Of course I think there will be dire consequences if it goes wrong’, said Srinivas, referring to the AI giants that have recently filed to go public.
US AI start-up Perplexity plans to go public in 2028 regardless of how OpenAI and Anthropic’s IPOs are received, company founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on June 8.
“Agnostic of the two companies, we were planning something for 2028. So, that’s still the case,” he told the publication. Although he added that “it is important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well”.
Srinivas’ comments come as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX all filed to go public in consecutive days. Estimates place Elon Musk’s company SpaceX as the front runner in the IPO race with a target raising of $75bn at a valuation of $1.75trn. While Anthropic and OpenAI are expected to be valued at around $1trn from the listing.
“I certainly think there will be dramatic consequences if it doesn’t go well… The SpaceX IPO this week will be a leading indicator of how Anthropic or OpenAI will pan out.”
In a filing last month, SpaceX, for the first time, revealed its loss-making financial position, reporting a net loss of $4.28bn on revenue of $4.69bn for Q1, compared to a net loss of $528m on revenue of $4bn last year. The company is valued at about 110 times its sales, with some analysts cautioning against its seemingly lofty growth expectations.
“The SpaceX IPO this week will be a leading indicator of how Anthropic or OpenAI will pan out,” Srinivas said, but added that he believes the companies will do well in their public rounds.
“We are very happy with their success, because their success means they will be able to invest more in the development of the frontier model. And every time the AI gets better, Perplexity gets better,” he said.
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that competes with the likes of Google (and its newly revamped AI Search), as well as AI-powered browsers like OpenAI’s Atlas. It was last valued at $20bn following a $200m round last September.
The first browser Comet sets itself apart from all its competitors by extracting the Internet to provide interactive answers to search queries.
Earlier this year, the company launched ‘Computer’, an AI agent that acts as a general-purpose “digital worker”.
“A computer takes a goal, like building a website, analyzing a dataset, or researching a market and builds and runs an entire workflow to deliver it, running on its own for hours or months,” explains Perplexity.
“We really want to be competitive and progressive at all levels, whether it’s local or local models and open source, and that will really set us apart from others and position us well to get an IPO like a year or two down the road,” Srinivas told the publication.
“I think the recent rise in Google equity shows that the market wants to invest in the AI frontier,” he added. Last year, Perplexity made an unsolicited offer of $34.5bn to buy Google’s Chrome browser. The deal did not work out.
Confusion has come under repeated legal threats from the BBC, the New York Times, Wired, Forbes and even Amazon over alleged content leaks. Late last year, Amazon sued Perplexity, demanding the company’s AI browser agent Comet stop making purchases on behalf of users online.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare released the Perplexity crawler on 24m websites—some of which it protects over concerns that the bot is involved in crawling tactics.
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Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. Photo: TechCrunch via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
