Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats on AI-powered search

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that answers user questions. Founded in 2022 and valued at over $1B, Perplexity recently crossed 10M monthly active users and is growing fast.

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Denis Yarats, co-founder and CTO of Perplexity.

Join us as we discuss:

00:00 Reactions to Perplexity’s prototype in 2022

1:33 How Arvind and Denis started working together

4:04 Building a text-to-SQL tool initially

6:34 Launch of ChatGPT and pivot to general search

9:46 Focusing on user data, and not on the foundation model

14:43 Perplexity’s early adopters

16:42 Early customer feedback

18:44 Perplexity’s core technical competencies

22:44 Subscription pricing and future gross margins

25:12 Perplexity’s hardware partnerships 

29:49 Future product vision 

32:50 Advice for founders in the AI space

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc.

Denis Yarats is the CTO and co-founder of Perplexity.

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.