(Reuters) – Japanese technology investor SoftBank (TYO:) Group Corp’s Vision Fund 2 will invest between $10 million and $20 million in U.S. search startup Perplexity AI at a $3 billion valuation, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday.
SoftBank will make the investment as part of a larger $250 million funding round, the report said, citing people familiar with the matter.
The deal has not yet been completed and its terms may still change, the report said.
SoftBank and Perplexity did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Perplexity’s search tools allow users to instantly get answers to questions with sources and citations. It is based on a variety of large language models that can summarize and generate information, from OpenAI to the open-source Meta (NASDAQ:) Llama model.
San Francisco, California-based Perplexity AI raised $73.6 million in January from a group of investors including Nvidia (NASDAQ:) and Amazon (NASDAQ:) founder Jeff Bezos, at a valuation of $520 million.
The company previously said it served more than 500 million queries in 2023 while spending few dollars on marketing.