The artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI Inc., which is developing a search engine to rival Alphabet Inc.'s Google, has secured a $500 million investment round, tripling its valuation to $9 billion.

This indicates that the AI search engine firm tripled its valuation in just six months after a SoftBank investment in June raised the company's valuation to $3 billion.

Reports indicate that Institutional Venture Partners led the most recent investment round. Additionally, it was also revealed that Perplexity was nearing completion on obtaining the financing from IVP.

In November, Anthropic, the company that developed the Claude AI model, said that Amazon had invested an extra $4 billion.

Elon Musk informed investors that same month that his artificial intelligence (AI) company, xAI, had raised $5 billion, valuing the enterprise at $50 billion.

OpenAI reported raising $6.6 billion at a record valuation of $157 billion in October.

These significant investments are also made in spite of some of the data and copyright-related disputes that AI businesses encounter.

The Wall Street Journal and New York Post's parent company, News Corp., sued Perplexity in October, claiming copyright infringement.

In addition to introducing additional finance-related tools, such as the ability to check up stock prices and corporate profits data, the startup released a solution that enables organizations to search internal information. The startup claimed to have over 15 million active users in March.

After being accused of plagiarism by several news publications, the business has started a number of revenue-sharing agreements with prominent publishers, such as Time and Fortune.Perplexity is supported by Nvidia Corp. and Jeff Bezos, the creator of Amazon.com Inc., in addition to SoftBank.

A similar lawsuit was brought by The New York Times against OpenAI last year. According to these reports OpenAI trained the startup's ChatGPT model using "millions" of articles.