By Charles Rollet
Publication Date: 2026-02-18 01:47:00
Perplexity is going full steam ahead with subscriptions and business sales and plans to focus more on monetization than it has in the past, executives said at a roundtable with reporters on Monday.
The AI search startup, based in San Francisco, is the latest to publicly distance itself from putting ads in chatbot answers, with one executive saying it isn’t exploring any ad deals at the moment. That’s a contrast to OpenAI, which is going all in on ads, while arch-rival Anthropic has publicly touted the opposite.
One Perplexity executive said the startup is increasingly targeting large businesses. The company has only five people on its enterprise sales team and plans to ramp that up, the executive added. It also wants to serve high-powered users such as finance professionals, doctors, and CEOs.
The focus on selling to businesses positions Perplexity more directly as a competitor to startups like Glean, which lets employees search internal files and data more efficiently with AI.
The move comes amid some VC skepticism about Perplexity’s prospects, with Silicon Valley investors voting it the company they’d most like to bet against in an informal poll at an AI conference last year, amid back-to-back funding rounds and talks of a wider AI bubble.
