Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion

[Laura94]

Nvidia is negotiating an investment in Perplexity as part of a new funding round that could value the AI search and agent startup at more than 30 billion dollars, according to reporting from The Information later confirmed by Reuters. That figure would represent an increase of more than 50 percent compared to the roughly 20 billion dollar valuation Perplexity landed in a funding round finalized about a year ago, and the investors involved in the new round beyond Nvidia haven't been publicly disclosed yet.

The number driving investor interest just as much as the valuation jump itself is Perplexity's underlying revenue growth. The company's annualized revenue has climbed above 750 million dollars, up from less than 250 million dollars at the start of this year, roughly tripling its run rate in under eight months. Much of that growth has reportedly been driven by Perplexity Computer, a cloud based AI agent product designed to automate computer based tasks for professional users, rather than the core search product that originally built the company's reputation as a challenger to Google.

This wouldn't be Nvidia's first involvement with Perplexity. The chipmaker has held an investment in the company since 2023, and the relationship deepened further in July when Perplexity committed to running its AI agent workloads on Nvidia's new Vera CPUs after finding they significantly outperformed traditional server processors for some of its core tasks. Interestingly, The Information also reported that Nvidia had at one point considered a licensing arrangement or even hiring some of Perplexity's team outright rather than taking a straightforward equity stake, before the conversation shifted back toward the current equity focused talks.

The deal fits an increasingly familiar pattern for Nvidia, which has spent the past two years building the hardware behind most major AI systems while simultaneously writing checks to many of the same companies that buy and depend on that hardware. Perplexity already counts Jeff Bezos, SoftBank, IVP, and New Enterprise Associates among its other backers, and a completed deal at this valuation would mark one of Nvidia's boldest individual AI bets yet, deepening a relationship between the two companies that reaches back further than most people watching this specific story probably realize

Nvidia in talks to invest in Perplexity at $30 billion valuation as revenue tops $750 million - Tech Startupstechstartups.com

[Freddie_47]

The Vera CPU relationship mentioned here connects directly to Nvidia's broader strategy of expanding well beyond just selling GPUs specifically. Getting a company like Perplexity to actually commit its production workloads to Nvidia's newer CPU line, on top of the existing equity relationship, creates multiple different kinds of lock in simultaneously, financial through the investment stake and technical through the actual infrastructure dependency itself.

That's a smarter, more durable customer relationship than a purely transactional hardware sale would be, since Perplexity now has real switching costs on both the financial and the technical side if it ever wanted to move away from Nvidia's ecosystem for any reason. Nvidia seems to be systematically building this exact kind of multi layered relationship across a growing number of its most important AI customers, not just with Perplexity specifically. It is a smart way to entrench a dominant market position well beyond what raw chip performance and pricing alone would achieve on their own

[QuietObserver]

The detail about Nvidia considering an acqui-hire instead of a straightforward investment is fascinating and doesn't get enough attention in most of the coverage I've seen. Wonder what specifically made them change direction back toward equity rather than just buying the team outright

[Gary98]

Doubling the valuation of a search competitor to Google feels like a notable move for Nvidia specifically, given how much Google itself both competes with and depends on Nvidia hardware simultaneously. The competitive dynamics among all these companies keep getting more tangled the deeper Nvidia gets into direct equity stakes across the whole ecosystem

[Carol84]

Tripling annualized revenue in under eight months is the number that actually justifies this conversation, not the valuation figure itself. A lot of AI funding rounds lately have been chasing pure narrative, this one at least has real, fast growing revenue attached to back it up