Nvidia Reportedly in Talks to Elevate Perplexity to Over $30 Billion, with Revenue Tripling in Eight Months
The Information reveals negotiations for a new round that would raise the AI search startup from $20 billion to over $30 billion in less than a year. None of the parties involved have confirmed.
The Information published a report stating that Nvidia is in talks to participate in a new funding round for Perplexity, which would value the startup at over $30 billion. This marks a leap of more than 50% from the $20 billion assigned to the company in September of last year. Neither Nvidia nor Perplexity have publicly confirmed the negotiations as of the publication of this article.
The declared trigger for the price revision is revenue. Perplexity's annualized revenue surged from less than $250 million at the beginning of the year to over $750 million by August, tripling in about eight months. According to sources consulted by The Information, the most visible portion of the new revenue comes from Perplexity Computer, the AI agent that operates applications on the user's computer to automate professional tasks. This kind of product has been the driving force behind the conversion of individual subscription accounts to corporate contracts, a category where Anthropic and OpenAI have been setting pricing.
Why Nvidia is Following the Script
If the round goes through as reported, it will be the second operation announced within 24 hours in which Nvidia invests in a lab that runs on its GPUs. On Monday, the company closed a $6 billion licensing deal and a $1 billion equity investment with Poolside to accelerate Nemotron. Perplexity fits into a parallel strategy: ensuring that customers consuming search and agents continue to run inference on Nvidia, even when they decide to migrate between cloud providers. This is the compute landlord thesis applied to the top of the AI stack, not just the training layer.
Perplexity counts among its investors Jeff Bezos, who participated in earlier funding rounds, and Japan's SoftBank, which is present on the cap table. Nvidia, according to the same report, initially discussed a technology licensing contract and the acquisition of specific talent, then shifted to a traditional equity stake format, following the same path it took with Poolside in Monday's announcement. There is no confirmation on the size of Nvidia's potential stake or about other investors in the new round.
Where the Check Moves the Needle
In the United States, if confirmed, the operation targets Google's search product, which still holds the largest share of the global market. Perplexity Computer is now one of the few general-use agents with a widely adopted paid product, making this move a direct competition for the emerging category of agentic search. A Perplexity valued at over $30 billion would have room to introduce corporate plans more aggressively, competing with Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 Copilot in the corporate knowledge segment.
In Europe, the timing is politically sensitive. The European Commission maintains an open antitrust investigation into gatekeepers in search, and the UK CMA has been pressing Google in the British market. An investor of Nvidia's caliber entering Perplexity's cap table gives European regulators a concrete alternative to point to when pressed about the lack of real competition in AI search. For consulting firms selling digital strategy in London and Frankfurt, this shifts the conversation with clients from single sourcing to multi-engine architecture.
In Japan, SoftBank has crossover interests. It is an investor in Perplexity and controls LY Corporation, owner of Yahoo Japan, one of the few search engines with a significant market share outside of Google and Baidu. A round led or co-led by Nvidia validates the thesis put forth by Masayoshi Son in his presentations from the last fiscal year, that AI agent platforms are detaching from the traditional SaaS multiple. Such a significant outcome on Perplexity's cap table anticipates the reading that SoftBank wants the Japanese market to have of its AI portfolio when it announces results in November.
What Remains Open
Perplexity ended 2025 valued at $20 billion, with annualized revenue below $250 million. It could be valued at over $30 billion with annualized revenue exceeding $750 million, if the round materializes as reported. This keeps the multiple at about 40 times revenue, high by corporate software historical standards, but within the range that AI rounds have been practicing in 2026. The lingering question is whether Perplexity's revenue is elastic enough to sustain this arithmetic in a world where OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are moving competitive products with similar investment. The answer will come from how much of Perplexity Computer survives as a paid agent, not from projections on the TAM for AI search.