AI firm Perplexity is planning to go public in 2028, Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas confirmed on Monday, regardless of how public markets receive the imminent listings of rivals Anthropic and OpenAI. The announcement comes during an extraordinary week for artificial intelligence finance, with three of the sector’s most closely watched companies all preparing landmark stock market moves within days of each other.
OpenAI filed confidentially for a US IPO on Monday at an $852 billion private valuation. Anthropic filed last week at $965 billion. SpaceX is set to list on Thursday at roughly $1.8 trillion. Against that backdrop, Srinivas told CNBC that Perplexity is not adjusting its timeline for either company.
“Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still remains the case,” Srinivas told CNBC in an interview.
The statement positions Perplexity as a deliberate outlier. While the three largest AI companies are racing toward public markets in a matter of months, Perplexity is choosing to hold back — at least for now.
Srinivas did not pretend the upcoming mega-listings are irrelevant to Perplexity’s future. He was direct about the risk if they stumble. “I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don’t go well, like there is no sugar coating on that. The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out,” he told CNBC.
He added that he expects the listings to succeed. “I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they’re doing well,” Srinivas said.
The company’s internal rationale for holding the 2028 line is not purely tactical. Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity’s Chief Business Officer, told Reuters in an emailed statement: “By consistently holding 2028 as our earliest date for an IPO, Perplexity has been able to build a healthy, high-growth business.”
That growth story is gaining weight. Perplexity’s annualised recurring revenue surpassed $450 million in March 2026, a 50 percent acceleration in just 30 days, driven by the launch of Perplexity Computer, an autonomous agent platform that integrates multiple AI models into a unified research infrastructure. The company is targeting $656 million in ARR by the end of 2026, up from $200 million in late 2025.
Perplexity was last valued at roughly $20 billion after a September 2025 funding round and has raised approximately $900 million in total — a fraction of what OpenAI, which secured $122 billion in a single round, and Anthropic, which raised $30 billion, have pulled in.
The gap in scale matters, but Srinivas has consistently argued that Perplexity operates by a different model. Its AI platform, when prompted, selects the most cost-effective model for each specific task. “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,” Srinivas explained. Unlike Anthropic and OpenAI, which spend heavily on training foundational models, Perplexity focuses on orchestrating existing models rather than building them from scratch.
Srinivas also weighed in on the valuations of his two largest rivals, which have drawn investor scrutiny. He said both companies deserve their high valuations because they are on the frontier of AI development, but warned that a slowdown in innovation could become a problem. “If for six months you don’t see a model capability advance from one of these two companies, then it’s a problem for them,” he said.
Regional and Global Impact
The wave of AI IPOs arriving in mid-2026 represents a defining test for public markets’ appetite for technology companies operating at extreme valuations without a clear near-term path to proportional profits. The filings, alongside SpaceX’s planned $75 billion offering at a $1.75 trillion valuation, will test investor appetite and scrutiny of revenue metrics and ARR, with direct implications for fundraising, adoption, and investor sentiment across the broader technology sector.
If the SpaceX listing — the first to price — attracts strong demand, it is expected to validate investor confidence ahead of the Anthropic and OpenAI offerings. A weak reception would complicate that picture significantly, as Srinivas himself acknowledged. For Perplexity, a 2028 listing would allow the company to observe how public investors ultimately price AI businesses before committing to its own debut.
Background
In March 2025, Srinivas addressed speculation about Perplexity’s finances directly, saying the company was not under serious financial pressure and had no plans to go public before 2028. “We have all the funding we’ve raised, and our revenue is only growing,” he said at the time. Perplexity was co-founded in 2022, and Srinivas previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind before launching the company. Its product is an AI-powered answer engine that competes with Google Search, ChatGPT, and Claude, with an enterprise tier priced at $40 per user per month. The company has attracted backing from investors including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA.
What Happens Next
SpaceX is scheduled to go public on Friday, June 13. Its performance is expected to set the tone for how investors assess the subsequent Anthropic and OpenAI offerings. Srinivas has said that successful listings would likely benefit the broader artificial intelligence ecosystem by reinforcing confidence in the sector’s growth prospects. Perplexity, meanwhile, has given no indication of any earlier-than-2028 listing and is targeting $656 million in ARR by the end of 2026 as it continues to build its financial track record ahead of its own eventual public market entry.
