The venture is reportedly looking to raise about $8B

AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise about $500 million at a valuation of $8 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

If the deal goes through on those terms, it would more than double Perplexity’s value from its $3 billion valuation when it was raised from SoftBank in the summer. The WSJ reports that the company currently receives approximately 15 million inquiries per day and brings in approximately $50 million in annual revenue.

Confused uses AI to help people search the web in a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, and the New York Times even sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and “doesn’t care who they belong to.” who is against him here.”

The fundraising talks come after OpenAI announced it will raise a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the line between chatbot and search engine, the company is going straight to search with SearchGPT.

Confusion did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.