Perplexity Creates Counter Monopoly Play To Gain PayPal’s Millions Of Users

Perplexity has extended a partnership with PayPal
and Venmo in a deal that could increase Comet browser users by millions. 

The agreement potentially creates a counter-monopoly play — a business strategy where a company or group of
competitors takes aggressive action to disrupt or challenge the dominant position of a monopolist. With this scenario, an AI-powered search competitor could potentially scale to challenge Google’s
dominance.

The partnership gives PayPal and Venmo customers in the U.S. — and for future international markets —  access to Perplexity’s Comet AI-powered browser without waiting
in line for the company to add users.

It also provides a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro, and gives Perplexity access to millions of new users.

Agreements like these will
likely give AI startups a boost as they attempt to compete with Google and other large artificial intelligence (AI) search and browser companies.

PayPal, which continues to find ways to add
new users, increased its number of active accounts by 2% year-over-year and 0.4% sequentially to 438 million in the second quarter of 2025. About 1.7 million new accounts were added in the
quarter. 

Perplexity, a Nvidia- and Jeff Bezos-backed startup, will have access to many of those PayPal and Venmo customers as it looks to take on OpenAI and Google in the AI-powered
search and browser markets.

The Comet browser launched in July, offers an AI assistant with summaries of search…