Nvidia reportedly eyes Perplexity at a $30B+ valuation as AI search becomes an agent business

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest in Perplexity as part of a funding round that would value the AI search startup at more than $30 billion, according to The Information. If it closes, the deal would mark another sharp step up for a company that is moving through private markets at a pace that would make most startups dizzy.

Perplexity’s last disclosed financing was a $200 million round at a $20 billion valuation in September 2025. The new round would push that figure up by more than 50% from a year ago. The company’s climb has been unusually fast: it raised $73.6 million at a $520 million valuation in January 2024, then $63 million at $1.04 billion in March 2024, before moving on to larger rounds of $500 million at $9 billion in late 2024 and $500 million at $14 billion in May 2025.

The latest financing history also includes a $100 million extension at $18 billion in July 2025, with Nvidia, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, NEA, and IVP all involved. After that came the $20 billion round and then the $23 billion round in January 2026. The source places Perplexity’s path from roughly $1 billion to more than $30 billion in about two years. That is a very short fuse.

Revenue has also been moving up quickly. Perplexity is said to have passed $750 million on an annualised basis, with much of that growth tied to Perplexity Computer, its cloud-based AI agent that handles multi-step professional tasks. At that level, a $30 billion valuation works out to close to 40 times sales, which private markets can stomach more easily than public ones, especially with CEO Aravind Srinivas said to have floated an IPO in the next few years.

Nvidia has already backed Perplexity before, including its Series B in January 2024, the March 2024 unicorn round, and the July 2025 extension. The Information says Nvidia had also looked at licensing technology and hiring some Perplexity staff before the discussion shifted to a straight equity stake. That makes sense: a stake keeps Nvidia close to a customer that uses GPU compute heavily and generates data that shapes future chip demand. The bigger story, though, is that search is no longer just about finding answers for people. It’s becoming the layer where AI systems look things up and do things, and Perplexity is now being priced like one of the companies that might own that layer.