Who owns Perplexity AI?

If you’re asking who owns Perplexity AI, you’re probably not looking for the “it’s private 🤷” shrug. You want to know:

whether a tech giant bought it
whether there’s one “main owner” behind the curtain
who has a meaningful stake and influence

Here’s the clean, practical answer:

Perplexity AI is privately held, so ownership is split across founders, employees with equity, and outside investors - with no fully public cap table that shows exact percentages. [4]

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Who owns Perplexity AI ✅

Not this: “Google owns it” / “Amazon owns it” / “OpenAI owns it.”
More like this: “A stack of shareholders owns it.”

Perplexity publicly announced a Series B raise led by IVP, with a long list of participating investors (including names like NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos), which tells us who owns pieces - not the whole thing. [1]

And later reporting (as of September 10, 2025) still describes Perplexity as raising private funding, not being acquired into a bigger parent company. [3]

Founders: the “obvious” ownership bucket 👥🚀

Founders nearly always hold meaningful equity early on (even after dilution), and Perplexity’s founding team is widely documented as:

Aravind Srinivas
Denis Yarats
Johnny Ho
Andy Konwinski [5]

Their exact percentages aren’t public, and that’s normal for a private company. [4]

Investors: who’s publicly connected to ownership 💸📈

When a startup raises a priced round, those investors typically get equity (often preferred shares). Perplexity’s Series B announcement is the cleanest primary-source snapshot of publicly named stakeholders:

IVP led the round
continued support included NEA, Databricks, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil
and new investors included NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, Bessemer Venture Partners, Tobi Lütke, and others [1]

Reuters also reported the round details, including the about $520M valuation figure and a subset of the participant list. [2]

Important nuance: investing ≠ “owns the company.”
It means: owns a stake. A slice. Sometimes a big slice, often a smaller one.

Ownership vs. control: who actually steers the ship? 🛳️🧭

This is the part people forget:

You can own a meaningful stake and still not “run” the company.
Control tends to come from things like:

executive leadership (CEO + team)
board seats
investor rights tied to preferred shares

In Perplexity’s own Series B post, the lead investor’s partner is explicitly described as joining the board, which is a concrete signal of governance influence, not just passive ownership. [1]

If you’re trying to answer “who owns Perplexity AI” in a practical way, the better focus is usually:

who sits on the board
who can block or shape major financing decisions
who controls votes (or has protective provisions)

That’s where the “stuff people forget” usually lives.

Employee equity: the quiet ownership chunk 🧑💻🌱

Most venture-backed startups carve out an employee equity pool (options / RSUs / grants). That means employees can be owners too - usually in small individual amounts, but collectively meaningful.

This is also why ownership gets complicated fast: as funding rounds happen, ownership becomes a layer cake:

founders (common stock)
employees (options/RSUs → common when exercised/vested)
investors (often preferred)
sometimes advisors/angels sprinkled in

Not dramatic. Just… capitalism with spreadsheets.

Why you can’t just “look up” the exact percentages 🔍🙃

Perplexity isn’t publicly traded, so it generally doesn’t have to publish a neat, retail-investor-friendly ownership breakdown.

More broadly, the SEC notes that private placements can involve “limited disclosure” compared with registered offerings - meaning the public often won’t see the full details you’d get with a public company. [4]

So yes:

exact ownership splits exist (internally, legally)
they’re just not typically posted where you can casually Google them

The “latest” ownership reality check (what we can responsibly say) 🧾

Two things can both be true:

Perplexity raised a Series B in early 2024 with publicly named investors. [1][2]
By September 2025, reporting still frames Perplexity as an independent startup raising private funding, not a subsidiary that got bought out. [3]

So if you’re looking for the “single overlord owner” story… publicly available reporting doesn’t support that.

Summary: so, who owns Perplexity AI? 🎯✨

Perplexity AI is privately held, meaning ownership is shared among:

Founders (Srinivas, Yarats, Ho, Konwinski) [5]
Investors publicly tied to equity via fundraising rounds (notably including IVP as Series B lead, with participants like NVIDIA and Jeff Bezos named publicly) [1][2]
Employees holding equity through startup compensation structures (options/RSUs), with exact totals not publicly itemized [4]

What you generally can’t get from public info is the full cap table and exact percentages - because private-company disclosure is limited compared with public markets. [4]

So yeah: Perplexity AI isn’t “owned by one overlord.”
It’s owned by a crowd with different-sized slices of the pizza 🍕… and a few people who get to vote on the toppings.