Inside Perplexity’s record-breaking Comet browser rollout
Founder of Perplexity Aravind Srinivas is not your archetypal tech mogul. A chess prodigy from India who spent his evenings fact-checking Wikipedia entries in multiple languages for fun, From an early age, Srinivas understood just how brilliant, and how damaging, the internet could be.
After watching a friend’s career collapse over a fraudulent online diploma, Srinivas made it his mission to protect others from the same pain.
Years later, this obsession became Perplexity, an AI company rewriting the rules of search on the internet. For co-founder Denis Yarats, the motivation was darker.
Raised in post-Soviet Russia, Yarats witnessed firsthand the weaponization of misinformation. “What scared me wasn’t just being wrong,” Yarats confides, “it was being systematically deceived and not knowing it.”
Together, their fear of unreliable information online shaped the company’s mission: to make the internet a source of truth, not speculation.
But the path has been far from clear.
In a world dazzled by viral chatbots and AI art generators, Perplexity’s original proposition, building a browser, code-named Comet, that treated every online fact as a research paper, felt countercultural.
But in April 2024, the tide turned, when Perplexity made $200-a-month Comet entirely free.
Overnight, the waitlist of 800,000 ballooned into millions of active users. Revenue rocketed past $1 billion in the following quarter.
College admissions officers used Comet’s credentialing features to verify online course claims; regulators leaned on its fake review detection, boasting 96% accuracy, as an industry benchmark. Suddenly, every major educational platform, from Teachable to Kajabi, scrambled to integrate it into their systems.
The market’s verdict was swift and emphatic.
In June, Perplexity closed a $1.8 billion Series D, sending its valuation soaring above $20 billion, placing it among AI’s most valuable startups worldwide.
Yet, for Srinivas and Yarats, the triumph is not in the numbers but in vindication: their hope, and fear, had been well founded.
As Perplexity’s tools begin reshaping how we trust, source, and certify knowledge online, their mission emerges not as a footnote in AI’s gold rush, but as the new backbone of our digital reality. In an age awash with “AI slop,” Perplexity’s mission to rebuild our trust in information online has taken a giant leap forward.
