Nvidia Weighs a Perplexity Stake at $30 Billion-Plus — Triple the Revenue, Half the Hype Multiple

Late on Sunday, August 23, The Information dropped a story that quickly crossed the wires via Reuters: Nvidia is in talks to invest in Perplexity as part of an equity funding round that would value the AI search startup at more than $30 billion. The financing would be worth billions of dollars, and it would lift Perplexity’s valuation by more than 50% from the $20 billion mark it finalized in September 2025.

If the deal closes, it would be the most visible sign yet that Nvidia’s AI strategy has evolved far beyond selling shovels for the gold rush — the company is now systematically buying ownership stakes in the miners themselves.

What We Know

According to the report, which cites people with knowledge of the discussions:

• Valuation: More than $30 billion, up over 50% from the $20 billion Series E-6 round finalized in September 2025. The new round would be worth “billions of dollars.”
• Revenue: Perplexity’s annualized revenue has climbed to more than $750 million, up from less than $250 million at the start of 2026 — a 3x expansion in roughly eight months.
• Growth driver: A significant part of that growth comes from Perplexity Computer, the cloud-based AI agent that professionals use to automate computer-based tasks — not from the consumer search product that made the company famous.
• Deal structure: Nvidia had previously weighed a technology-licensing deal and staff hires before pursuing the equity route, according to reporting on the talks.
• Status: Perplexity declined to comment; Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. As always with unconfirmed funding talks, the deal could still change or fall apart.

There’s also a notable prior relationship here. Nvidia participated in Perplexity’s January 2024 round — a $73.6 million financing alongside Jeff Bezos that valued the startup at just $520 million. A $30 billion valuation today would represent a roughly 58x markup on that entry point in under three years.

The Math Actually Got More Reasonable

Here’s the detail most coverage is glossing over: on a revenue-multiple basis, this round is cheaper than Perplexity’s last one.

At $20 billion valuation in late 2025, Perplexity was doing roughly $200-250 million in ARR — a multiple in the neighborhood of 80-100x revenue, which even AI bulls called stretched. Today, at $30 billion-plus on $750 million-plus in ARR, the implied multiple is around 40x. The valuation went up 50%, but the revenue tripled. In a market where investors have spent 2026 punishing AI companies that grow narratives faster than income, Perplexity is one of the few whose multiple compressed while its price rose.

That’s precisely the profile Nvidia has been shopping for. Perplexity also signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft earlier this year to use Azure, per Bloomberg — meaning the startup is already writing large infrastructure checks, some of which flow into an ecosystem Nvidia supplies.

Nvidia’s Equity Machine

The Perplexity talks don’t exist in isolation. They’re the latest entry in what has become the most aggressive corporate venture program in the history of technology:

• OpenAI: Nvidia committed $30 billion to OpenAI’s $110 billion round at a $730 billion pre-money valuation announced in February 2026 — alongside $30 billion from SoftBank.
• Model startups: Nvidia has backed or negotiated with a long list of AI labs, including previously reported discussions around talent and technology deals — exactly the structure it explored with Perplexity before choosing equity.
• The flywheel logic: Every dollar Nvidia invests in an AI application company tends to come back as GPU orders, networking gear, and software ecosystem lock-in. When the customer is also a portfolio company, the revenue relationship becomes stickier — and Nvidia gets an inside view of demand that no earnings call can provide.

The strategy has critics, who note it inflates valuations Nvidia itself partially validates, and that vendor-financing dynamics of this kind have ended badly in past capex cycles. But with Anthropic and OpenAI both reportedly filing toward IPOs that could be the largest in history, Nvidia’s equity positions are shaping up as a second profit engine alongside its core chip business.

Why Perplexity, Why Now

Three things make Perplexity an unusually attractive target for Nvidia’s capital:

1. The revenue mix has shifted toward agentic workloads. Perplexity Computer — a cloud agent that operates a computer on a user’s behalf — is now a stated growth driver. Agent workloads are among the most inference-hungry applications in the stack: multi-step tasks, long context, tool calls, retries. Every agent session is recurring compute demand in a way a single search query never was.

2. Search distribution is a strategic chokepoint. AI answer engines are quietly becoming the default interface through which professionals and developers discover information — displacing the query patterns that made Google dominant. Owning a piece of that shift hedges Nvidia against a future where the application layer, not the model layer, captures the most value.

3. The IPO clock is ticking. CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC in June that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028, regardless of how the market receives the Anthropic and OpenAI listings. Getting in now — at a pre-IPO valuation set in a private market Nvidia helps shape — is far cheaper than buying the same stake after a public debut. SoftBank, another Perplexity backer, has run precisely this playbook with its OpenAI stake.

The Caveats

Worth keeping in mind before treating this as done:

• Neither company has confirmed the talks, and funding discussions at this scale routinely leak, morph, or collapse — especially when the would-be investor is simultaneously a supplier, a customer, and a competitor’s partner.
• The Information’s reporting notes Nvidia explored licensing and acqui-hire routes first. Choosing equity suggests confidence, but it also means Nvidia weighed and rejected cheaper alternatives.
• Perplexity’s $750 million ARR, while impressive, is still a fraction of the run rates at OpenAI (reported above $40 billion) and Anthropic (reported at $65 billion). The $30 billion valuation prices Perplexity as a bet on the agent era arriving, not on search economics alone.

What to Watch

• Whether the round formally announced in the coming weeks, and who else participates — a syndicate including existing backers Bezos and SoftBank would signal confidence; a Nvidia-only round would raise concentration questions.
• Any accompanying commercial agreements: cloud commitments, inference partnerships, or NIM-style deployment deals often accompany equity checks of this size.
• Perplexity’s next revenue disclosure. The startup has now tripled ARR once in 2026; the bull case for a 2028 IPO needs that trajectory to continue while losses stay contained.

For now, the signal is clear: the most important supplier in the AI economy believes enough in Perplexity’s agent-driven growth to want direct ownership — and it’s willing to pay more than $30 billion to get it.