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2024 was a record year for Perplexity. The AI research startup, founded by former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, raised hundreds of millions of dollars in its latest fundraising round. would have valuing the company at $9 billion – and introduced several notable features, including Pages, Spacesand innovative shopping experiences.
These developments have solidified Perplexity’s reputation as an “AI-driven” knowledge discovery engine, setting itself apart from traditional search giants like Google and Bing, which are integrating AI capabilities into their existing engines.
However, the journey is far from over.
Faced with intensifying competition, Perplexity is expanding its scope with a new addition to its portfolio: Carbon. The company has just acquired this startup, for an undisclosed amount, to fill the “data gap” companies face with AI search and streamline the knowledge discovery process in their workflows.
Carbon has developed a comprehensive recovery framework that streamlines the process of connecting external data sources to LLMs. Users can exploit the Carbon universal API Or SDK to synchronize their data sources and retrieve data for use with LLMs. It offers native integrations with more than 20 data connectors and supports more than 20 file formats, including text, audio, and video files.
The Growing Reach of AI Research
From individuals to business users, almost everyone uses AI search as part of their workflows today. The idea of the technology is quite simple: you don’t need to wade through tons of links and content to find relevant information and information. Instead, the information will come to you as a direct response to your query.
Perplexity has thrived on this approach, using a range of great language models to retrieve information from the web and simplifying users’ work. It even allows teams to extract information from their personal or work files such as PDF and Word documents.
But here’s the problem. The web hosts public information and downloading internal files (PDFs, conversations, images) individually is not feasible for business users dealing with large volumes of proprietary data. This affects the quality of answers, keeping them generic and devoid of important organization-related context.
Highlighting this “data gap,” Sanjeev Mohan, former Gartner Research vice president for data and analytics, told VentureBeat that one of the biggest AI trends for 2025 will be ETL for unstructured data. It will enable teams to extract and transform data from dispersed internal sources, enabling their LLMs to generate highly relevant and accurate answers.
That’s exactly what Perplexity plans to do with the acquisition of Carbon’s comprehensive, streamlined recovery framework. Perplexity will integrate Carbon’s retrieval engine and connectors into its technology stack, giving users of the search platform a direct way to connect their various data sources, from Google Docs and Notion to Hubspot and Slack.
According to the company, this will expand the pool of knowledge that powers the AI search engine, making its answers more complete, relevant and personalized for users.
What can users expect from carbon-powered Perplexity?
While Perplexity just acquired Carbon and the integration hasn’t happened yet, it’s pretty easy to imagine how the additional data connectors will improve the workflows of enterprise teams using the AI search engine .
For example, if one needs to shift the date of a launch and determine the latest deadline and guidelines set by their team, Perplexity would be able to analyze all the data from Google Docs, Notion and Slack – and take the necessary measures. correlations – to find the information that answers the question.
Essentially, there would no longer be any need to worry about piecing together context from the web, individual applications, and messages. The platform does everything on its own to provide the answer.
“The notable benefit of this setup is that our technology can find the answer without requiring you to identify the document/database this information is stored in,” Sara Platnick, communications manager at Perplexity, told VentureBeat.
Another example, she says, could be extracting information from customer meetings. Perplexity would be able to retrieve the details and subject of the conversation from the connected CRMs in no time.
In particular, by taking advantage of Carbon generation augmented by recovery (RAG), Perplexity makes enterprise search more accessible, saving companies from having to build their own RAG pipelines from scratch.
“By finding and interpreting proprietary data with Perplexity and Carbon, companies can address a range of multi-faceted genetic AI use cases. We’re seeing major adopters focus more on customer service, document processing, image processing and recommendation engines, Kevin Petrie, VP of Research at BARC US told VentureBeat.
Execution will be key
The acquisition of Carbone is just the beginning. The real key will be execution, or how seamlessly and securely the startup’s technology is integrated. After all, we’re talking about proprietary data from some of the most critical knowledge repositories managed by businesses.
“Companies are rightly hesitant to expose their intellectual property to the public. Perplexity and Carbon will therefore need to provide governance controls ensuring that companies can keep their data inside their own firewalls. They have no interest in sharing secrets or forming a public model to imitate their intellectual property,” Petrie added.
On the Perplexity side, Platnick noted that “all information from internal and private sources on the engine is encrypted, as is all data transmitted and stored in Carbon’s data connectors.” She also emphasized that the company has additional protections to ensure that private documents remain private and are not accessible to unauthorized users.
As of now, there is no specific timeline for Carbon’s integration with Perplexity. However, the startup will cease operations of its Managed API on March 31, 2025. Existing customers using the API have already been informed of their exclusion, with the Carbon team assisting them with the transition.
