Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI Inc., at the Bloomberg Tech Conference on Thursday, June 5, 2025 in San Francisco, California, USA.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC that Perplexity plans to go public in 2028, regardless of how Anthropic and OpenAI’s listings are received in the market.
“Irrespective of these two companies, we were planning something in 2028 and that hasn’t changed,” Srinivas said in an interview aired on Tuesday.
Srinivas previously said the company had no plans to go public before 2028, but his latest comments suggest a more specific timeline.
The CEO’s comments come after Claude developer Anthropic secretly filed for an initial public offering last week. Details of the stock price are unclear, but Anthropic was last valued at nearly $1 trillion. OpenAI also secretly filed for an IPO on Monday.
Along with SpaceX this week, these listings will be some of the largest in history and will test investor appetite for these mega IPOs.
“If it doesn’t work out, I certainly think there’s going to be a ripple effect, so there’s no sugar coating. SpaceX’s IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator of what’s going to happen with Anthropic and OpenAI,” Srinivas told CNBC.
“I think it’s important for the AI industry that these IPOs do well. In fact, I think IPOs will do well, because IPOs do well.”
The valuations of both Anthropic and OpenAI, known as Frontier Labs due to their world-class models, have come under intense scrutiny from investors.
Srinivas said both companies deserve high recognition because they are “at the frontier.” He said a slowdown in the pace of innovation could hurt company valuations, adding that there is currently no sign of that happening.
“If you don’t see progress in model capabilities from one of these two companies for six months, that’s a problem for both companies,” Srinivas said.
Spending on AI is in the spotlight
Enterprise spending on AI has been a key focus since OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on a company livestream that businesses are currently discussing how much they are spending on AI. Altman said the cost of AI is a “huge issue.”
One trend that has emerged is “token maxing,” where employees increase the use of AI to demonstrate productivity. “But people don’t just want to use tokenmax, they really want to use whatever model is best for that particular task,” Srinivas says.
Perplexity’s products are based on models from various companies. When prompted, its AI will figure out the best model to use for a given task, taking into account cost.
“If there’s an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, and it’s 10 to 20 times cheaper than the Frontier model, we’ll probably use it,” Srinivas explained. “The future remains great for Frontier Intelligence, but not with the kind of ill-advised spending we have seen in recent months.”
