Perplexity Keeps 2028 IPO Plan Despite AI Mega-IPOs

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed the company will pursue an initial public offering in 2028 regardless of how SpaceX, Anthropic or OpenAI perform in the meantime. He reported Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue topped $450 million in March 2026.

He noted recent large AI-related listings and high-valuation filings will influence investor appetite but will not change Perplexity’s timetable. He described those offerings as tests of investor scrutiny on revenue and model progress and warned that if the largest model developers go six months without meaningful capability advances their valuations could become harder to justify.

Perplexity’s growth and capital strategy differ from firms that invest heavily in training the largest models. The company said ARR rose roughly 50% in the 30 days after launching Perplexity Computer, an autonomous agent platform that combines multiple AI models into a single research infrastructure. Perplexity is targeting $656 million in ARR by the end of 2026, up from about $200 million in late 2025.

On model choice and costs, Srinivas said: “If there is an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, I’d probably use that if it’s 10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model.” He criticized what he described as excessive industry spending and indicated Perplexity plans to scale revenue without matching the raw compute budgets of the largest labs.

The company credits Perplexity Computer with recent subscription and enterprise revenue growth, saying customers want integrated agent workflows rather than single, monolithic models.

Investors and analysts will track sustained revenue growth, customer retention and margins compared with peers that prioritize large-scale model training as the company moves toward its planned 2028 public debut.