A majority of my daily phone conversations are with people who are really into AI like me and Perplexity is certainly one of my favorite AI companies so I wanted to give more info on how it works…
It’s 2025, and you’re a financial analyst trying to figure out if a company is worth investing in. Normally, you’d juggle five different subscriptions. PitchBook for company data. Statista for market trends. Specialized finance databases. You’d pay thousands per month just to piece together an answer. You’d spend hours copy-pasting between windows.
Then you open Perplexity.
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You type: “Should I invest in biotech companies in Southeast Asia right now?”
Instantly, the AI pulls together data from Statista about market trends, PitchBook info on which companies are actually solvent, and expert analysis. All in one place. Better yet, every claim has a source you can verify. No subscription juggling. No paywalls popping up. Just answers backed by real, trusted data.
This wasn’t how AI search worked before. When Perplexity pulled off this trick in mid-2025, it changed the game.
From Scrappy Startup to Serious Competitor
Three years after launching in 2022, Perplexity was the underdog trying to dethrone Google. The company had made waves by being the first AI search engine that actually used current information from the web instead of regurgitating outdated training data. But it had a reputation problem. Journalists accused it of stealing their work and not giving credit.
The company didn’t ignore the criticism. Instead, they did something clever.
Rather than hide where their answers came from, they made sources transparent. And then they did something even bolder. They decided to pay publishers directly when people used their content.
The Deal That Changed Everything
In May 2025, Perplexity struck partnerships with industry heavyweight publishers: Wiley (which publishes everything from medical journals to “For Dummies” books), Statista (the go-to for statistics), and PitchBook (where investors check company details). The pitch was simple: “Let your premium content work for you inside AI.”
Instead of a one-time licensing fee, publishers got paid every single time someone used their data. This “pay-per-use” model meant the more useful the data, the more money they made.
It was genius. Publishers got a new revenue stream. Users got access to premium information they normally couldn’t afford. And Perplexity got the credibility it desperately needed.
The Numbers Got Absolutely Wild
What happened next stunned Silicon Valley.
In May 2025 alone, Perplexity processed 780 million search queries. That’s more than three times the 230 million it had handled just nine months earlier in August 2024. Think about that. People were using this service that much.
By mid-summer, the platform was getting 153 million website visits per month and available in 238 countries, supporting 46 languages. About 2 million people were visiting every single day.
The user base exploded too. Perplexity went from 15 million active users in 2024 to 22 million by mid-2025. That’s a 50% jump in just six months.
One Country’s Growth Was Actually Insane
Here’s where it gets really interesting. In India, something unexpected happened.
A major telecom company called Airtel made a strategic bet. They decided to give free Perplexity Pro subscriptions to all their customers. The result? Users in India jumped 640% year-over-year, and app downloads in the country shot up 600% year-over-year, reaching 2.8 million downloads in just one quarter.
Suddenly, Perplexity wasn’t just popular in Silicon Valley. It was becoming a household name in one of the world’s largest markets.
Money Started Rolling In
The company wasn’t just growing for growth’s sake. By mid-2025, Perplexity was generating $80 million in annual revenue. Remember, they made almost nothing in 2023. By September, that number was approaching $200 million.
Investors noticed. In July, the company raised $100 million at an $18 billion valuation. Two months later, they raised another $200 million at a $20 billion valuation. That’s doubling your company’s value in 60 days.
In three years, Perplexity had raised $1.5 billion total. That’s serious money for a company that started as an experiment.
Why This Actually Matters
For years, Google had an iron grip on search. You had a question? Google was the only real option. But Google’s answers were links to websites, not actual answers. You had to do the work yourself.
Perplexity said something different: “What if we just gave you the answer directly, from trusted sources, right here?”
And people went bananas for it.
For a researcher, a student, a business analyst, or anyone who just wants a straight answer without wasting an hour online, this was revolutionary. No more opening 47 tabs. No more wondering if you’re looking at outdated information. No more paying for five different subscriptions.
The Problem They Solved
There was one more thing that made this whole story special. They did it ethically.
At a time when AI companies were being sued left and right for using published content without permission, Perplexity built a system where everyone got paid. Journalists got credit. Publishers made money. Users got better information. Nobody lost.
That “pay per use” model started as a pilot, but if it scaled, it could become a major revenue stream for the entire publishing industry. This would give journalists, researchers, and experts a way to actually profit from their work in the AI age.
What Happens Next
By late 2025, Perplexity had fundamentally changed what people expected from AI search. They’d proven you could build a massive, profitable company by being transparent about sources and fair to publishers. They’d shown that speed and reliability could beat out an entrenched competitor.
Most importantly, they’d made premium research accessible to anyone who could type a question.
That’s not just a business success story. That’s how entire industries get disrupted. Quietly. Sensibly. By solving a problem people didn’t know they had until suddenly they couldn’t imagine living without it.
