Perplexity to IPO in 2028 Regardless of Anthropic
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- Perplexity plans a 2028 IPO independent of how the Anthropic and OpenAI listings are received, CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC, calling the timeline "agnostic" of the two frontier labs
- Srinivas said the SpaceX IPO this week will be a "leading indicator" for how the Anthropic and OpenAI offerings go, though he expects them to perform well
- Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO last week followed by OpenAI on Monday, with Srinivas noting both are under investor scrutiny as among the biggest listings in history
- Perplexity's product routes each task to the best-suited model, with Srinivas saying he would use an open-source model "if it's 10 to 20 times cheaper" and still gets the job done 90% of the time
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a company live stream that AI costs are a "huge issue" for enterprises, spawning a trend Srinivas called "tokenmaxxing"
Why it matters: Perplexity is explicitly decoupling its IPO timeline from the fate of the Anthropic (last valued near $1 trillion) and OpenAI mega-listings, which Srinivas called a "test of investors' appetite" for the AI sector. With smaller AI players charting independent paths while the frontier labs absorb market attention, the IPO window is no longer a single event but a sequenced pipeline of risk and opportunity.
