Perplexity has announced its acquisition of Carbon, a Seattle-based startup specializing in connecting AI systems to external data sources. This strategic move positions Perplexity to broaden its AI-powered answer engine by enabling seamless search functionality across enterprise applications and personal documents.
Key Points:
- Carbon's technology will enable Perplexity to search through users' files and messages across platforms like Notion, Google Docs, and Slack
- The integration leverages retrieval augmented generation (RAG) to connect AI models with external databases
- The entire Carbon team will join Perplexity to accelerate the development of new features.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivasan envisions a future where users won't need to manually search through multiple platforms to find information. The company plans to integrate Carbon's data connectors into its technology stack, allowing its AI to pull insights from various sources including internal databases, cloud storage, and document repositories.
This marks Perplexity's second acquisition, following its purchase of Spellwise in 2023. The entire Carbon team will join Perplexity, a move that the company says will accelerate its product development timeline and feature releases.
"We believe your AI should be personal to you — at home, work, or on the go — and data connectivity is a key part of everyone's daily workflows," said the Perplexity team in their announcement. This vision aligns with the company's recent growth trajectory, which included the launch of Enterprise Pro and features like Spaces and Internal File Search throughout 2024.
The company plans to roll out the integrated features in early 2025.