The chip maker shifts from licensing agreements towards equity ownership as the artificial intelligence search company more than doubles its worth in a year on annualised revenue racing towards $750 million and rapid adoption inside enterprises.
Nvidia is in discussions to take an equity stake in Perplexity AI at a valuation above $30 billion, according to reporting this week. Sunnov Investment Pte. Ltd. reads it as the clearest sign yet of the chip maker’s intent to own part of what its silicon makes possible. The talks price it more than 50% above the $20 billion of its last funding round. They land as annualised revenue climbs beyond $750 million from under $250 million eight months earlier, though neither side has disclosed a figure running to billions of dollars.
Nvidia weighed a different route beforehand, with executives considering a multibillion-dollar arrangement to license Perplexity’s technology for software of its own. The move towards ownership follows a template refined earlier this month with Poolside AI, where the chip maker paid $6 billion for the system behind that start-up’s Laguna coding models. A further $1 billion went in at a $12 billion pre-money valuation, and 109 engineers moved across. The co-founders, among them the former GitHub chief technology officer Jason Warner, stayed to run the business.
Structure repays close reading here, since the Poolside agreement takes the form of a non-exclusive licence rather than an acquisition. That leaves the start-up free to sell the same technology elsewhere, while backers including Bain Capital Ventures collect the fee by the end of next year. Nvidia takes the software and much of the talent, while the business it drew them from carries on.
The same play ran late last year on a far larger scale, with roughly $20 billion paid for a non-exclusive licence to Groq’s inference technology. Its founder, Jonathan Ross, joined Nvidia, while the finance chief took over the company left behind. That outlay stands as the largest in the chip maker’s history, dwarfing its earlier purchase of Mellanox at close to $7 billion.
Each of these transactions pairs a licence with a minority stake rather than a takeover, and the repetition suggests a template rather than opportunism. The design hands Nvidia “the economics of ownership without the regulatory burden of a merger”, in the assessment of the Director of Private Equity at Sunnov Investment, Thomas Gardner. Gardner points to the preserved independence of Groq and Poolside as the feature keeping competition authorities at a distance.
The relationship between the two companies runs deeper than a single cheque, dating to Perplexity’s Series B round and extending well beyond capital. The pair announced a collaboration last year on sovereign models tuned to local languages across Europe and the Middle East. Nvidia supplies the infrastructure, while the search company covers all 24 official languages of the European Union and keeps data resident regionally. Localisation already shows in the revenue mix, with Germany the second-largest market by sales and Samsung’s Bixby assistant reaching hundreds of millions of handsets.
Legal exposure runs alongside that growth, with copyright claims from Dow Jones and The New York Times still to be resolved. A public offering expected within roughly two years would give Nvidia an exit, though financial return is only part of the calculation. Gardner frames the prospective stake as a defensive holding in the layer of the stack the chip maker does not control, describing the search interface as “the meter that runs on every chip Nvidia ships”. Rivals including AMD and Cerebras court the same customers with alternative hardware.
Perplexity’s acceleration traces to Computer, an agentic product introduced early this year that coordinates as many as 19 models in parallel. It completes work on a user’s behalf across hundreds of connectors spanning Gmail, GitHub, Slack and Salesforce. Usage-based pricing now sits on top of subscriptions running from $20 to $200 a month, since autonomous agents consume far more compute per query than search.
The trajectory behind the valuation is steep on any measure, with annualised revenue at $221.4 million at the close of last year. It passed $450 million by the end of the first quarter, roughly double the $200 million of a month earlier, and reaches $750 million this month. More than 100 million people use the search and agent tools each month, tens of thousands inside enterprises.
Equity stakes are only one instrument in a financing toolkit that has come to resemble monetary policy more than procurement. The company offers smaller cloud providers revenue backstops, renting back capacity they fail to sell in exchange for a share of sales. That leaves their cash flows bankable and the debt raised to buy its chips financeable. Support for as much as $250 billion of financing for an OpenAI data centre sits under consideration, alongside a separate $350 billion package.
Circularity carries a risk of its own, since a supplier that finances the purchase of its own products manufactures the demand it later reports. Gardner casts the chip maker as “the central bank of the artificial intelligence economy”. Sunnov Investment treats the Perplexity discussions as the consumer-facing expression of that same strategy. The contest for position hardens as generative artificial intelligence passes into enterprise infrastructure.
Sunnov Investment, founded in 2012 and based in Singapore, manages long-only equity strategies alongside long/short equity, global macro, event-driven and systematic mandates for accredited investors, foundations and endowments worldwide, while developing structured routes for eligible retail participation. Website: https://sunnov.com. Media enquiries should be directed to Deng Hui at d.hui@sunnov.com. The business is registered as Sunnov Investment Pte. Ltd., UEN 201225494E.