31. Perplexity

Founders: Aravind Srinivas (CEO), Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho
Launched: 2022
Headquarters: San Francisco
Funding: $1.7 billion
Valuation: N/A
Key Technologies: Artificial intelligence, generative AI
Industry: Enterprise technology
Previous appearances on Disruptor 50 list: 1 (No. 27 in 2025)

Perplexity, a direct challenger to Google’s search and browsing ecosystem, has been targeting even more Big Tech business over the past year.

The company, which has made inroads as an AI-powered search engine that gives simple answers to people’s prompts, expanded its reach in July 2025 by launching its first AI-native browser Comet. For $200 a month, the browser integrated Perplexity’s search engine — which answers 1.5 billion questions worldwide monthly — and allowed users to summarize pages, conduct research, draft emails and complete tasks with the help of its AI-powered assistant. The company expanded to a free version last October.

“Comet is not just a browser,” Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC. “It’s meant to be a true personal assistant. … That’s where AI is headed next. It’s not just about delivering answers or being a sycophant chatbot that tells you what you want to hear. It’s truly about delivering value and you being able to delegate tasks to it.”

Perplexity now counts 92% of Fortune 500 companies as users, and has forged partnerships with the likes of Samsung, Deutsche Telekom, Vivo, and Airtel. The company also announced FedRAMP compliance initiatives and launched “Perplexity for Gov” alongside the U.S. General Services Administration, signaling growing ambitions in regulated and institutional markets.

Furthering its mission to help make consumers’ lives easier through everyday behavior, it introduced more than 20 new features and products across all its subscription tiers and rapidly increased its headcount by 40% last year to keep up with its growing initiatives.

Late last year, it facilitated an AI-powered shopping agent in partnership with PayPal, which is intended to allow consumers to go from online discovery to making purchases on over 5,000 merchant sites. The system also can recall past behavior to make recommendations more tailored to the specific user. 

“The agentic part is the seamless purchase right from the answer,” Perplexity chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told CNBC. “Most people want to still do their own research. They want that streamlined and simplified, and so that’s the part that is agentic in this launch.”

Its push into e-commerce hasn’t come without controversy or delays. Perplexity accused Amazon of “bullying” after receiving legal threats that Comet’s tools violate Amazon’s rules and disrupted the customer experience. Amazon won a court order to block the AI-agents from crawling its sites in March. Perplexity has argued Amazon is using its dominance to suppress AI-driven shopping innovation and consumer choice. Perplexity told CNBC in a statement after the court decision that it “will continue to fight for the right of internet users to choose whatever AI they want.”