‘I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well’, Srinivas said of the AI giants that recently filed to go public.

US AI start-up Perplexity has plans to go public in 2028 regardless of the reaction to upcoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, the company’s co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC on 8 June.

“Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still remains the case,” he told the publication, though he added that it is “important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well”.

Srinivas’s comments come as OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX all applied to go public within days of each other. Estimates place Elon Musk’s company SpaceX as the frontrunner in the IPO race with a targeted raise of $75bn at a $1.75trn valuation, while Anthropic and OpenAI are each expected to be valued at around $1trn post listing.

“I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well … The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be like a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out,” said Srinivas, adding that he believes the companies will do well in their public rounds.

In a filing last month, SpaceX, for the first time, revealed its loss-making financial standing, reporting a net loss of $4.28bn on revenue of $4.69bn for Q1, compared with a net loss of $528m on revenue of $4bn a year ago. The company places its valuation at roughly 110-times its sales, with some analysts cautioning against its seemingly lofty expectations for growth.

“We are very happy for their success, because their success means they’ll be able to invest more into frontier model development. And every time AI gets better, Perplexity gets better,” said Srinivas.

Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine that competes with the likes of Google (and its newly revamped AI Search), and AI-powered browsers such as OpenAI’s Atlas. It was last valued at $20bn following a $200m funding round last September.

The start-up’s browser Comet orchestrates across its competitors by scraping the internet to provide conversational answers to search queries.

Earlier this year, the company launched ‘Computer’, an AI agent that acts as a general-purpose “digital worker”.

“Computer takes a goal – like build a website, analyse a dataset, or research a market – and builds and runs the entire workflow to deliver it, working on its own for hours or even months,” Perplexity explained.

“We actually want competition and progress on all levels, be it frontier or local models and open source, and that will position us really differently from the rest and position us well to go for an IPO like one or two years down the line,” Srinivas told CNBC.

“I think Google’s equity raise recently shows that the market wants to invest in AI frontier,” he added. Last year, Perplexity made an unsolicited $34.5bn offer to purchase Google’s Chrome browser. The deal did not materialise.

Perplexity has come under repeated legal threat from the likes of the BBC, New York Times, Wired, Forbes and even Amazon over alleged content scraping. Late last year, Amazon sued Perplexity, demanding Comet stop making purchases on behalf of users online.

Meanwhile, Cloudflare delisted Perplexity’s crawler from the approximately 24m websites it protects over concerns that the bot engaged in stealth crawling tactics.

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Perplexity co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas. Image: TechCrunch via Flickr (CC BY 2.0)