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Perplexity AI, which is essentially a company trying to compete with Google for search. They've just released their own AI browser. This is a very interesting company in the AI space, has just reached an 18 billion dollar valuation. This is just months after the last funding round. I want to break down how they're able to do that, what they're able to do with the 18 billion. And at the same time, Perplexity right now is trying to unlock a completely different growth Strategy to than OpenAI has used. They've struck up an absolutely massive partnership that is going to unlock a ton of new users for them. So I want to cover all of that. I think this is how it kind of plays into them being able to raise at an $18 billion valuation. But anyways, overall this is a fascinating company doing some very interesting things that you were not seeing with a lot of the other AI companies. They're really focusing on growth and they're doing it in some unique ways. So we're going to dive into all of that. But before we do, if you want to try any of the latest AI models from the top AI companies, I would love for you to try out my startup AI Box AI we just released a playground. It's in beta right now and it essentially allows you to use the top 40 AI models. There's all the top companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Deepseek, et cetera. But we also have a whole bunch of really interesting image models that you may not have tried, like Ideogram, Black Forest Labs, we have Text to Speech, we have speech to text, 11 labs and a whole bunch of other interesting tools. You can chat with all of the models in one chat thread. So you could just switch like okay, you know, you know, Claude just generated you an article, then you go to 11 labs, you get it to generate an audio file. Reading that article, you can switch it over to Black Forest Labs and get you to generate some images for that all in the same thread. So it's a really cool tool. It stores all of your media files in one place, which makes it easy to find and also easy to find. But prompts and what conversations you are using to generate those files. So there's a cool, a whole bunch of cool tools. But anyways you can check it out. There's a link in the description, make sure you go try it out. It's $19 a month, saves you subscriptions to all of these different platforms. So hope that is a money saver and really useful for trying out all of the Latest AI models. All right, let's get into what Perplexity is doing. So essentially they just raised at a $14 billion valuation two months ago. They're now at an $18 billion valuation, a $4 billion bump. This is, this is pretty interesting because in the, in the past 18 months they've went from about $500 million, the beginning of 2024 to now 14 billion in May. This is a company that is growing insanely fast. They did, I think get a bit of resistance from investors in this latest May funding round. But the round closed and a bunch of new investors afterwards came to the company. They told them they could purchase equity, an $18 billion valuation. So that's essentially how that happened. So this is only a three year old company. It's trying to take on Google right now, which is pretty impressive. And the latest growth vector that they're trying to unlock right now is actually India. So they're taking a completely different approach with this. Yes, you know, people here in America use it, but India is a big area that they're focused on and they've actually just pulled a brand new. It's actually so technically like growth rate wise. I think last quarter it grew faster than Open Air in India. But like we're talking about, you know, like 8 million users versus like 46 million users or something crazy like that. So OpenAI is like still way bigger and also has way more paid revenue. But they are doing some interesting things to grow, which obviously is helping fuel their valuation and kind of market saturation. So the big thing that they recently did, they just partnered this week with Variety, intel, which Air, Airtel, which is Baharti Airtel, which is India's second biggest telecom operator. There's Reliance Geo, which is the number one. So this is the second biggest. And they are offering 12 month perplexity pro subscriptions to anyone on Bahardi Airtel. So this is normally worth about 200. And if you want to know how many people are using this company, it's 2 or it's 360 million subscribers right now. So 360 million people are going to get access to Perplexity Pro for free if they would like to take them up on it. This is an exclusive deal, which means that no other telco in that in India can actually offer Perplexity services. Now what blew me away is that's including free access. So if you would like to use Perplexity in India, you have to go through them, period. And this is I guess kind of the way the deal works. They probably are paying some sort of discounted rate for the premium, you know, premium seats or whatever that they can give away to people. But Perplexity is not able, you're not able to access it basically through anyone else other than them. So to me that was very interesting. I think obviously Perplexity is willing to do that because, you know, this is the opportunity to potentially have, you know, an extra 360 million users which would make their valuation, you know, their usage go up a ton and make their valuation go up a ton to be able to raise a ton of money from investors. So to them I think they're just looking at as a growth metric. I don't know how long like the terms of this deal, how long this lasts, a 12 month engagement, this is a multi year thing overall. You know, like, I think Perplexity doesn't want to get themselves stuck where there's only one way you can ever access or use Perplexity. But at the end of the day it's a. Yeah, I think this is a pretty good deal for them to, to actually grow. So Airtel's partnership is one of Perplexity's biggest moves I think yet in what they've been basically been doing. They have the partnerships with more than 25 telcos globally. They made a bunch of deals with SoftBank in Japan and SK Telecom in South Korea. So I think at the end of the day they're trying a bit of a different like approach where they're reaching out directly to telecommunication companies who are helping push them forward, get them users and you know, offer this free service to their, to their, to their customers to help. And Perplex is happy because it's helping to grow what they, what they have going on, you know, all their total usage. So Perplexity is already getting a ton of traction in India like I mentioned. So it was actually the Q2 of this year. Downloads in India went up 600% year over year. So but that's about 2.8 million. This is according to Sensor Tower, which kind of shares some of this type of data. So if we're comparing this though, it's not, I feel like it's not really a Fair comparison. Like 600% sounds crazy, but ChatGPT and ChatGPT had about a 587% increase. So like a lot, but, but less. But ChatGPT is at 46.7 million downloads, so they're at 2.8 million. It's just, it's like, you know, it's a lot and it's growing A lot, but it's not, it's not 46 million yet. So obviously OpenAI is, you know, definitely winning in this. I would say, though, the growth trend is extended to active users as well. Perplexity is monthly active users in India is up 640% year over year in a lot. In Q2 chat, GPT grew by 350%. So when you're actually talking about active users, it's really, really good numbers for Perplexity, I would say ChatGPT has a huge lead in absolute numbers. They have 19.8 million monthly active users versus perplexity, which has 3.7 million monthly active users in India. So, you know, great. I think there's a lot of potential here, but you could see why they would make this kind of deal with a telecommunication company in India. If they have, you know, let's say, 3.7 million monthly active users in India and there's a potential to reach 300 million. I think they're going to try to take that, going to try to take that leap and, and essentially get extra users from something like this. So their CEO of Perplexity has made a whole bunch of commitments to India to try to work with them, to try to develop things there. I think he's, he's really trying to build a lot of strong partnerships there. I think we see India as a really important market. Even Google has launched, you know, updates to Google Gemini in India before they release it to a lot of other countries. So I think this is, you know, one of the big markets to keep an eye on as we look at countries or as we look at companies trying to expand their growth rate. And the number one thing to know, though is India versus United States. Obviously, India is much more price sensitive. So when, you know, ChatGPT is thriving in United States, they're making like orders of magnitude more money from that than their India users over in India. So definitely something to keep an eye on. But usage is usage and I think this is all things that will help to raise more money, talk to investors and grow the company overall. So very exciting times over at Perplexity. Hey, if you enjoyed the episode today, the number one way you could say thank you is by leaving a rating and review wherever you get your podcast. I know sometimes it's kind of annoying, but it helps the show at a ton, helps me find more amazing guests. 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