Revolutionizing Conversational Commerce

Perplexity AI  has teamed up with  PayPal to offer users searching for products, booking travel or buying tickets the ability to instantly pay using the search engine.

The integration will disrupt agent commerce by allowing users to purchase products or services directly from the chat interface. The partnership extends the reach of Perplexity’s commerce tools to PayPal users worldwide.

In a statement, Perplexity CEO and co-founder Aravind Srinivas called PayPal a natural partner because both companies share a common vision of how important trust is in the age of artificial intelligence. PayPal President and CEO Alex Criss said the partnership opens up new possibilities for how conversations can now drive business.

“We’re making it easy and safe to shop right in chat when inspiration strikes,” Chriss said. “This is an important step toward making conversational commerce a reality.”

PayPal says every step of the process — from payment to shipping, tracking and billing — “will be handled behind the scenes through PayPal account linking, a secure tokenized wallet, and new password-based checkout processes that can eliminate the need for passwords and simplify the process to a single request or user click.”

Perplexity AI is reportedly finalizing a new $500 million funding round that will bring its valuation to $14 billion. The latest round will be led by venture capital firm Accel.

Neither Perplexity nor Accel responded to requests for comment on this news, but the Wall Street Journal cited sources close to the companies.

The funding is at the lower end of the $500 million to $1 billion range Perplexity had been planning to raise, according to the Journal. If the deal goes through, it would be Perplexity’s fifth round of funding in less than 18 months and a significant jump in the company’s valuation, as it would rise more than 50% from the end of last year. The San Francisco-based company was valued at $3 billion in June 2024, and $9 billion in December.

Previous investors include Nvidia, SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, and individuals including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, Google AI chief Jeff Dean, and Meta*’s Yann LeCun.

Perplexity has positioned itself as a competitor to other AI search engines in the market, announcing plans to build an AI-powered web browser called Comet in February, though no exact launch date was given. Perplexity has said its main goal is to break Google’s dominance in the market and create a more competitive and diverse environment for consumers.

“You don’t have a choice. For Google, this is a strategy,” Perplexity wrote in a blog post in April. “At Perplexity, we don’t see ourselves as competitors to Google. We’re building something different. We’re trying to give people a different choice: search that gives answers, assistants that work. AI that’s smart, accurate, and trustworthy.”

The news comes as Perplexity is rapidly expanding its offerings to customers. In January, the company launched an API service called Sonar, which allows companies to integrate Perplexity’s generative search tools into their apps, as well as an agent for everyday tasks called Perplexity Assistant.

Earlier this year, Perplexity announced it would integrate its virtual assistant into smartphones, including Motorola and Samsung.

*Meta and its products (Instagram, Facebook) are prohibited in the Russian Federation