It’s hard to have a conversation about AI startups these days without Perplexity coming up. 

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang professes to using the AI search engine “almost every day,” Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke says it has replaced Google for him, and I’ve heard Mark Zuckerberg is also a user. I’ve been testing Perplexity in place of Google the past couple of months and have found it to be better for some searches, like ones with a very specific answer I’m looking for. But I’m not ready to completely switch. 

Part of the buzz around the one-year-old startup can be attributed to its CEO Aravind Srinivas, who isn’t afraid to lean on his impressive investor list and dish out hot takes on social media. Perplexity has raised over $74 million to date and was last valued at over $500 million, making it one of the highest-profile names in consumer AI right now. The product has over 1 million daily users and continues to grow quickly, Srinivas told me in an interview from the back of an Uber last week.