Nvidia is negotiating an equity investment in AI startup Perplexity that would value the company at more than US$30 billion, more than 50% higher than its valuation about a year ago, multiple sources reported today [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
Perplexity’s valuation was around US$20 billion in September 2025. The new round would significantly increase that figure amid strong revenue growth driven by Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent used by professionals to automate tasks [1, 3, 5].
The startup's annualized revenue jumped from under US$250 million at the start of 2026 to over US$750 million recently [1, 2, 4, 6]. Part of this growth stems from a US$750 million agreement signed earlier this year with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud services [1, 3, 4].
Perplexity, which has raised over US$1.7 billion in total funding, primarily rents AI compute power from cloud providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave, and is expanding its AI compute capacity [4, 6]. Nvidia is already an investor in Perplexity, joining backers such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Japan's SoftBank Group [1, 2, 4, 6].
CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a June interview that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028 regardless of the market reception to IPOs by Anthropic and OpenAI. "Regardless of how the market receives the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI, Perplexity plans to go public in 2028," he told CNBC [1, 2, 3, 5].
While the exact size of the current funding round is not fully confirmed, reports indicate it could reach several billion dollars [4, 6]. Multiple outlets reported Nvidia’s ongoing investment talks on August 23 and 24 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6].
