Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, said on Monday that he doesn’t want his AI startup to be acquired by Big Tech giants like Meta and Google.
“We plan to remain independent,” Srinivas said in an interview with CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on her eponymous podcast.
Bosa was asking Srinivas about the lucrative “acquihire” deals made by tech giants like Microsoft when he elaborated on his ambitions for his AI-powered search engine.
An “acquihire” deal takes place when a large company buys a startup for its talent, instead of its products. Recent AI “acquihire” deals have been slightly different in that target companies usually remain independent after founders and top executives have been poached.
For instance, Google announced on Friday that it had hired AI coding startup Windsurf’s CEO, Varun Mohan, and his key researchers to join the DeepMind team. Windsurf remained an independent company until it was acquired by its competitor, Cognition, on Monday.
A similar move was made by Microsoft in March 2024 when it hired a team from startup Inflection AI to boost its in-house AI efforts.
Mustafa Suleyman, originally Inflection AI’s CEO, was named CEO of Microsoft AI. His cofounder, Karén Simonyan, became Microsoft AI’s chief scientist.
Srinivas, however, said he wasn’t after such exit opportunities.
“Our goal is actually to give an alternative to the world to Google, Google Chrome, Google search, Google Assistant, Gemini, all the workspace integrations they have done,” Srinivas told Bosa, adding that Google was a “true monopoly.”
“We got to go for that, and if we don’t try, then nobody else will,” he continued.
In May, The Wall Street Journal reported that Perplexity was looking to raise $500 million in an upcoming funding round. The Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, said the new round of funding would give it a $14 billion valuation.
Last month, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple executives were holding internal discussions on whether to acquire Perplexity. Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, had praised Srinivas’s company while testifying at the Google antitrust trial in May.
“We have been pretty impressed with what Perplexity has done, so we’ve started some discussions with them about what they’re doing,” Cue said.
Apple had declined to comment on Gurman’s story.
Srinivas told Bosa on Monday that he thinks there’s enough room within the AI race for both Big Tech and startups to compete with each other.
“The world needs little tech to win, right? If it’s all about Big Tech winning, then there’s no interest. I think AI is the first time there’s opportunity for a new player to come and disrupt the existing market and big tech can still keep winning,” Srinivas said.
“For example, Meta can make their existing suite of products better with AI, or Apple can make their phones sell better with AI, and Perplexity can still exist on all these platforms and have its own business,” he added.
A representative for Perplexity declined to comment when approached by Business Insider.
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