On August 12, 2025, Perplexity sent Google an unsolicited, all-cash offer to buy Chrome: $34.5 billion, more than double Perplexity’s own valuation at the time and far beyond the roughly $1.5 billion the four-year-old startup had actually raised. Google hadn’t put Chrome up for sale. Perplexity’s own spokesperson confirmed the offer, first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and the company said it would fund the purchase with help from outside investors it didn’t name. It was the second time in seven months that Aravind Srinivas’s company had proposed buying a business dramatically larger than itself — and it happened while nearly every major American newsroom was busy suing Perplexity over the product that offer was meant to grow.
Seven days behind ChatGPT, and citing sources from day one
Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in August 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, bringing together research stints at OpenAI, DeepMind and Google Brain (Srinivas holds a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley) with engineering and quant-trading backgrounds from Meta, Quora and Databricks. The product launched publicly on December 7, 2022 — seven days after ChatGPT — built around a different pitch than a chatbot: instead of a single generated answer, Perplexity’s “answer engine” returns a synthesized response with inline citations back to the pages it drew from, positioning itself as a challenger to Google search rather than a general-purpose assistant.
Bidding for things he couldn’t afford, twice
The Chrome bid wasn’t Srinivas’s first unsolicited run at a business many times Perplexity’s size. In January 2025, as the U.S. law banning TikTok unless it was sold by ByteDance was about to take effect, Perplexity submitted a proposal to merge with TikTok’s U.S. operations, according to CNBC’s initial report and follow-up coverage from Fox Business, TechCrunch and the Associated Press (via ABC News). Srinivas revised the plan after feedback from the incoming Trump administration: the new structure would let the U.S. government own up to 50% of the combined company once it went public at a valuation of at least $300 billion, though the government’s shares would carry no voting rights and no board seat. Nothing came of it — TikTok’s ownership was ultimately resolved without Perplexity.
The Chrome bid seven months later followed the same shape but aimed higher. Perplexity’s offer promised to keep Chrome’s underlying Chromium engine open source, invest $3 billion into it, and leave Chrome’s default search engine untouched — meaning Google, Perplexity’s main rival, would keep its default placement even under Perplexity ownership, according to terms reported by TechCrunch and corroborated by CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg and Al Jazeera. The timing wasn’t random: the bid landed as Google was appealing a federal court ruling that it had illegally maintained a monopoly in search, with the Justice Department having proposed a Chrome divestiture as a remedy. Google didn’t take the offer, and has continued to fight the divestiture in court.
The valuation kept climbing toward the bravado
What makes the bids more than stunts is how fast the company behind them was actually growing. Perplexity’s valuation went from $9 billion in December 2024 to $14 billion in June 2025 on a $500 million round led by Accel, to $18 billion a month later on a $100 million extension (Bloomberg), to $20 billion in September 2025 on another $200 million, according to Reuters. By late August 2026, The Information reported that Nvidia was in talks to invest at a valuation above $30 billion — a jump of more than 50% from the year-old $20 billion mark — with Perplexity’s annualized revenue run rate reported at $750 million, up from under $250 million at the start of the year. No deal had closed as of publish.
The personal number moved just as fast: Srinivas debuted on the M3M Hurun India Rich List in October 2025 as India’s youngest billionaire, at 31, with an estimated net worth around $2.5 billion, reporting from WION, Gulf News and Newsgram shows, and he appears on Forbes’ 2026 Billionaires list. Asked by CNBC in June 2026 whether rivals Anthropic and OpenAI moving toward their own public listings changed his plans, Srinivas said no: “Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028 so that still remains the case.”
The lawsuits are about the same model funding the bids
None of that growth has settled the legal exposure sitting under Perplexity’s core product. On December 5, 2025, the New York Times sued Perplexity in federal court, alleging the company’s answer engine reproduced Times journalism “verbatim or near-verbatim” in response to user queries, at times attributing fabricated information back to the Times, and that Perplexity had ignored 18 months of warnings to license the content instead, according to reporting from CNBC, TechCrunch and Axios. The Chicago Tribune filed a similar suit that same month (TechCrunch, Axios), and Dow Jones — the Wall Street Journal’s publisher — had already sued the previous year. On February 27, 2026, Perplexity asked the court to trim parts of both the Times and Tribune cases, arguing that any infringing output is the “highly atypical, litigation-driven” result of a user’s own prompt rather than Perplexity’s conduct, and pushing to dismiss the trademark claims specifically — while leaving the core copying allegation to be litigated, per Reuters and Bloomberg Tax. Both publishers opposed the motion. No ruling had been issued as of publish.
What founders should actually take from it
The tempting reading is that audacity is the whole strategy: bid for things you can’t afford, let the headlines do the marketing, and let the fundraising catch up later — which, so far, it has. But the more useful detail is what’s still unresolved underneath the bidding. Perplexity has never closed a bid for TikTok or Chrome; the Nvidia round that would value it above $30 billion hadn’t closed as of publish either; and the lawsuits Srinivas is fighting aren’t about some side project — they’re about whether the exact mechanism that makes Perplexity’s product work is legal to run at all. Betting big and getting attention has clearly worked for growth. Whether it survives contact with a federal judge is a different question, and Srinivas is running both bets — the audacious offers and the copyright defense — at the same time, in public, before either one has an answer.
This is an editorial profile assembled from public reporting and primary company/court filings. Sources: TechCrunch — Perplexity offers to buy Chrome for billions more than it’s raised, CNBC — Perplexity offers to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion, CNN — AI search firm Perplexity makes $34.5 billion surprise bid for Google Chrome, Bloomberg — AI Startup Perplexity Makes $34.5 Billion Bid for Google’s Chrome Browser, Al Jazeera — Perplexity AI makes unsolicited $34.5bn bid to buy Google Chrome, TechCrunch — Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok, Fox Business — Perplexity AI bids on TikTok, ABC News (AP) — New bid for TikTok from Perplexity AI could give US government 50% stake, Bloomberg — Aravind Srinivas’ Startup Perplexity AI Valued at $18 Billion, Yahoo Finance (Reuters) — Perplexity finalizes $20 billion valuation round, SiliconANGLE — Nvidia reportedly eyes another investment in Perplexity AI at a $30B valuation, CNBC — Perplexity plans IPO in 2028 regardless of what happens to Anthropic or OpenAI, Forbes — Aravind Srinivas profile, WION — Hurun India Rich List 2025: Aravind Srinivas youngest billionaire, CNBC — The New York Times sues Perplexity, TechCrunch — The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement, Axios — NYT sues Perplexity for copyright infringement, TechCrunch — Chicago Tribune sues Perplexity, TradingView (Reuters) — Perplexity asks court to trim New York Times copyright case, Bloomberg Tax — Perplexity AI Seeks to Trim NYT, Chicago Tribune Copyright Suits, Wikimedia Commons — File:Aravind Srinivas TC Day 3.jpg.
