Perplexity at $100M ARR
Jan-Erik Asplund
TL;DR: As LLM labs threaten Perplexity by bundling in search, Perplexity is counter-attacking by eating up consumer use cases like travel search and going upmarket. Sacra estimates that Perplexity hit $100M ARR in March 2025, re-accelerating to 17% CMGR3, up from 12% in Q4 2024. For more, check out our full report and dataset on Perplexity.
We first covered Perplexity at $11M ARR in March 2024, growing 4,272% YoY, when it broke through with its strong initial product-market fit, and we followed up with them at $51M ARR in October, growing 1,600% YoY, as it started to scale.
In February, we covered Perplexity’s projections for $656M of ARR in 2026 and their roadmap for getting there.
Here's our Perplexity update with key points via Sacra AI:
- Sacra estimates that Perplexity reached $100M in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in March 2025, marking a 59% increase from the $63M reported at the end of 2024, with growth re-accelerating from 12% CMGR3 in Q4 2024 to 17% CMGR3 in Q1 2025, maintaining its $9B valuation from December's Series D for a now-reduced 90x forward revenue multiple as its operational economics continue to improve.
- In March 2025, Perplexity partnered with Deutsche Telekom to pre-install Perplexity Assistant on its new AI Phone, giving it potential access to over 245M European customers and accelerating its mobile footprint—advancing its strategy to own the AI interface layer across devices as OpenAI and Google race to bundle assistants into their own hardware ecosystems.
- To deepen monetizable engagement in high-intent verticals and build defensibility against Google’s Gemini-powered product search, Perplexity rolled out a new visual search experience for shopping across hotels and travel in March 2025, with the potential upside of building a Kayak-style CPC ad business ($1.50–$3.00 per click) that doesn’t require a logged-in user base.
For more, check out this other research from our platform:
- Perplexity (dataset)
- How Perplexity hits $656M ARR
- Perplexity at $51M ARR
- Perplexity: the $11M/year Cliff Notes for the web growing 4,272%
- Anthropic vs. OpenAI
- OpenAI (dataset)
- Anthropic (dataset)
- OpenAI vs. Anthropic vs. Cohere [2023]
- CoreWeave: the $465M/year cloud GPU startup growing 1,760% YoY
- Edo Liberty, founder and CEO of Pinecone, on the companies indexed on OpenAI
- Pinecone: the MongoDB of AI
- Will Bryk, CEO of Exa, on building search for AI agents
- AI talking heads growing 1024%
- Kyle Corbitt, CEO of OpenPipe, on the future of fine-tuning LLMs
- Scale (dataset)
- Databricks (dataset)
- Hugging Face (dataset)
