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Another AI company has joined the rapidly-expanding market of enterprise AI services, and they already have some major names on board.

AI-powered search company Perplexity has announced Perplexity Enterprise Pro, a new version of its "conversational answer engine" chatbot that's been designed specifically for enterprise use. The company also announced a $63 million Series B1 round of funding that values the company at $1.04 billion, double its $520 million valuation from January. The round was led by former Y-Combinator AI head Daniel Gross and included several follow-on investments from business and AI superstars like Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy.

Businesses that are already using Perplexity Enterprise Pro, according to the company, include NVIDIA, Stripe, Thrive, HP, Zoom, and the Cleveland Cavaliers basketball franchise. According to an official blog post from Perplexity, data teams on the Cavs use the app to research ticket sales trends and prospect for partnerships, while HP's sales teams use it to craft compelling pitches and expedite the sales process. Perplexity Enterprise Pro will charge/charges companies a monthly fee of $40 per seat or an annual fee of $400 per seat.

Founder Aravind Srinivas posted on X that he's heard from many Perplexity users who aren't allowed to use the app at work due to data and security concerns. To assuage those concerns, he says, Perplexity Enterprise Pro is outfitted with heightened security protocols and enterprise-grade data retention.

Perplexity, which claimed the No. 21 on Fast Company's 2024 list of the world's 50 most innovative companies, functions like a chatbot-version of Google. The app combines internally-built and third-party models from companies like OpenAI and Meta with a function called retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which enables Perplexity to trawl the internet for the latest information about any question. Through this combination, Perplexity is able to deliver natural-language answers about almost anything, regardless of its training data, and can link directly to the sources of its answers.

Thrive founder and CEO Arianna Huffington posted on X that her company, which provides solutions to help workers improve their mental and physical well-being, is using Perplexity to find the latest peer-reviewed medical research on daily behaviors. The research findings are used to inform "microsteps," small actions that workers can take to improve their health.

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