U.S. AI search startup Perplexity has closed its fourth round of funding this year, increasing its valuation to $9 billion, according to the Financial Times.

The completion of the latest round of funding comes as it tries to compete with offerings from Google and OpenAI.

Multiple sources familiar with the matter revealed that the $500 million funding round was led by Institutional Venture Partners, with participation from Nvidia, New Enterprise Associates, B Capital and T Rowe Price.

Previously, SoftBank Group's Vision Fund 2, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, Meta's chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, and others have also participated in investments in Perplexity.

This week, Perplexity acquired a small Seattle startup called Carbon, which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said the acquisition will allow the company to search for documents and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack and other enterprise apps sometime in early 2025.