CEO says OpenAI and Anthropic will not budge firm's 2028 timeline
Anthropic is valued at nearly US$1tn and OpenAI at more than US$850bn, yet the smaller rival they tower over is in no rush to follow them onto the public markets.
Perplexity will hold to its plan for a 2028 initial public offering regardless of how investors receive the listings of OpenAI and Anthropic, chief executive Aravind Srinivas told CNBC in an interview that aired on Tuesday.
"Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still remains the case," he said.
Chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko reinforced the point, telling Reuters in an emailed statement that holding 2028 as the earliest date "has allowed Perplexity to build a healthy, high-growth business."
The discipline stands out against a rush by larger peers.
OpenAI confidentially filed for a US IPO on Monday, following Anthropic's confidential filing last week, according to Reuters, while SpaceX is set to debut on Friday.
CNN reported that the three offerings will offer the closest look yet at the AI market and could generate hundreds of billions of dollars in stock sales, putting investor appetite to the test.
Srinivas said the outcome will matter for the wider sector even if it does not change his own timeline.
A weak debut would send ripple effects through the sector, he told CNBC, with "no sugar coating on that."
The SpaceX IPO this week, he said, will be "a leading indicator" of how Anthropic or OpenAI fare when they go public.
Investors are already scrutinizing the valuations of the two frontier labs.
Both companies have earned their valuations by sitting "on the frontier," Srinivas said, though a slowdown in innovation could weigh on them.
Six months without a fresh capability advance from one of them, he said, would spell trouble.
Recent market reaction shows how little margin for error those valuations carry.
Broadcom, a partner to both OpenAI and Anthropic, reported revenue growth of 48 percent for its second quarter and projected 180 percent semiconductor growth, yet its shares fell more than 13 percent last week, according to CNN.
AI chip stocks dropped with it, the Nasdaq slid for three straight days, and the S&P 500 posted its worst day since October, the network reported.
"People want more," Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein, told CNN. "They always want more."
The companies have disclosed enough to whet that appetite.
OpenAI raised US$122bn in March at a US$852bn valuation and is generating US$2bn in revenue a month, up from US$1bn a quarter.
Anthropic's valuation climbed from US$380bn in February to US$965bn in May, the company said, on US$47bn in run-rate revenue, and the fintech firm Ramp found more businesses used Anthropic than OpenAI for the first time that month.
Both have shared the figures voluntarily rather than out of legal obligation, according to CNN.
Public ownership will raise the stakes.
Expectations that look "manageable in private markets" can turn "relentless under the glare of public ownership," Nigel Green, chief executive of advisory firm deVere Group, told CNN by email.
He said public markets rarely give companies years to deliver on a vision.
Srinivas also pointed to where cost discipline may bite.
Customers are growing pickier about which models they use, he said, and Perplexity weighs price across the several models it draws on.
An open source model that "gets the job done 90 percent of the time" would win out if it ran "10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model," he told CNBC.
According to Reuters, Perplexity was last reportedly valued at US$20bn, trailing both rivals.
