Nvidia is discussing an equity investment in AI startup Perplexity that would value the company at more than $30 billion, according to multiple sources reporting on August 23, 2026 [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This round would boost Perplexity's valuation by over 50% from a previous $20 billion financing round completed in September 2025 [1, 2, 4].

Perplexity’s annualized revenue has surged to over $750 million in 2026, up from under $250 million at the start of the year. This growth has been driven in part by Perplexity Computer, a cloud-based AI agent tool [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. A key catalyst was a $750 million agreement Perplexity signed with Microsoft in January 2026 to use Azure cloud services [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

The AI startup offers a conversational search engine that lets users pick from several AI models including ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Perplexity currently rents AI compute mainly from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and CoreWeave, and plans to expand its compute capacity following this funding round [5].

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has praised Perplexity’s AI tool as something he uses daily for real-time web data collection and industry insights [5]. Nvidia also previously considered acquiring some of Perplexity’s technology licenses and hiring its employees, valuing the company’s talent and innovation highly [3, 5].

Perplexity has raised over $1.7 billion in funding to date, with notable investors including Jeff Bezos, Japan’s SoftBank Group, New Enterprise Associates, and Accel [1, 3, 4, 5].

CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a June 2026 interview that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028 regardless of the market reception of IPOs by Anthropic and OpenAI. "Perplexity is planning to go public in 2028 regardless of how the market receives the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI," Srinivas stated [1, 2, 4].

The financing talks with Nvidia reflect Perplexity’s rapid growth and ambitions to scale its AI services. The timing and details of the funding round have not been finalized, but it marks a major step toward increasing Perplexity’s AI compute resources and market presence.