Perplexity AI Timeline: Search, Comet Browser, Amazon Case

An answer engine that became a browser

Perplexity was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. Srinivas, its chief executive, previously worked at OpenAI and Google DeepMind. The company's core product answers a query in prose with inline citations rather than returning a list of links, and the same retrieval and answer stack is sold as an API for other products to call directly. [2]

Perplexity's valuation climbed fast even by AI-industry standards: roughly $1 billion in April 2024, reported near $14 billion in June 2025, around $20 billion by September 2025, and about $21 billion in early 2026 reporting. These are the figures press coverage has attached to successive funding rounds; Perplexity itself does not publish a running valuation. [2]

From answers to agents

Perplexity's relevance to AI has shifted from search itself toward what an assistant is allowed to do on a person's behalf. Comet, its Chromium-based browser with Perplexity built into the tab, launched in July 2025 behind a $200-a-month tier before going free worldwide that October. Every major chat product has since shipped some version of the same idea: an assistant that acts inside a browser rather than just answering questions about one. [3][4]

In August 2026, Perplexity shipped Portable Computer, built with NVIDIA on the DGX Spark desktop hardware. It runs its orchestrator and subagents locally on a smaller model and asks permission before sending any step to a larger model in the cloud, an approach whose stated selling point is that local steps do not consume paid credits. [5]

An agent shopping without permission

In March 2026, a federal judge in San Francisco, Maxine Chesney, granted Amazon a temporary injunction against Comet's shopping agent. Amazon's complaint said Comet accessed a user's password-protected Amazon account with that user's permission but without authorization from Amazon itself, in violation of Amazon's terms of service, following a cease-and-desist letter Amazon had sent the previous November. [6][7]

The order bars Comet's agent from Amazon's password-protected systems and directs Perplexity to destroy the account data it had collected. A Perplexity spokesperson said the company would keep contesting the case, describing it as a question of a user's right to choose the AI tool they use. This is the first ruling on the timeline on whether an agent acting on a person's behalf, with that person's login, counts as the person or as something Amazon can exclude on its own terms. [6]

Atlas interpretation: The case is still being litigated, and a temporary injunction settles nothing about the underlying question. What it does establish is that the argument is being fought over a specific legal mechanism, unauthorized access to a password-protected account, rather than a broader claim about whether shopping agents should exist at all. [6]

One signature among many

Perplexity was one of more than a hundred companies, alongside OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and others, that signed an August 2026 open letter calling for collective action on cyber defense. The letter's premise, that AI models currently help defenders faster than attackers and that the industry expects the window to close within months, was OpenAI's wording as host of the letter, not a position Perplexity issued on its own. [8]