Perplexity’s Carbon integration will make it easier for businesses to connect their data with AI search

2024 was a banner year for Perplexity. The AI ​​search startup, founded by former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas, has raised hundreds of millions of dollars — its latest funding round reportedly valued the company at $9 billion — and introduced several notable features, including sites, spaces, and innovative shopping. experiences.

This development cemented Perplexity’s reputation as an “AI-first” knowledge discovery tool, standing apart from traditional search giants such as Google and Bing, which are plugging AI capabilities into their existing engines.

However, the journey is far from over.

Faced with increasing competition, Perplexity expands its reach with a new addition to its portfolio: Carbon. The company just acquired the startup for an undisclosed amount to address the “data gap” that businesses face in AI search and streamline the knowledge discovery process in their workflows.

Carbon has developed a comprehensive search framework that simplifies the process of connecting external data sources to LLM. Users can tap into the Carbon universal API or SDK to sync their data sources and retrieve data for use with LLM. It offers native integration with more than 20 data connectors and supports more than 20 file formats, including text, audio and video files.

The expanding scope of AI search

From individuals to business users, almost everyone today uses AI search as part of their workflows. The idea behind this technology is very simple – you don’t have to go through a lot of links and content to find relevant insights and information. Instead, the information will come to you as a direct response to your query.

This approach benefits Perplexity, which uses a number of large language models to extract information from the web and simplify the user experience. It even allows teams to extract information from their personal or business files, such as PDFs and Word documents.

But, here’s the thing. The web is the home of public information, and individual uploading of internal files—PDFs, conversations, images—is not feasible for enterprise users working with large volumes of proprietary data. This affects the quality of the answers, keeping them generic and missing important contexts relevant to the organization.

Highlighting this “data gap,” Sanjeev Mohan, Gartner Research’s former vice president of data and analytics, told VentureBeat that one of the biggest AI trends for 2025 will be ETL for unstructured data. It will enable teams to extract and transform data from scattered internal sources, ultimately enabling their LLMs to generate highly relevant and accurate answers.

Now, that’s exactly what Perplexity plans to do with the acquisition of Carbon’s comprehensive and streamlined search framework. Perplexity will incorporate Carbon’s search engine and connectors into its technology stack, giving users of the search platform a direct way to engage their various data sources, from Google Docs and Notion to Hubspot and Slack.

The company says this will expand the knowledge base powering the AI ​​search engine, making its answers more comprehensive, relevant and tailored to users.

What can users expect from Carbon-powered Perplexity?

While Perplexity just acquired Carbon and the integrations have yet to be made, it’s pretty easy to imagine how the additional data connectors will improve the workflows of enterprise search engine AI teams.

For example, if someone has to move a launch date and needs to know the last deadline and guidelines set by their team, Perplexity will be able to analyze all the data in Google Docs, Notion and Slack — and require correlations — to find the information that answers the question.

In essence, it would no longer have to worry about combining context from the web, individual applications and messages. The platform does everything itself to provide the answer.

“A significant benefit of this setup is that our technology can find the answer without you having to pinpoint the document/database where that information is stored,” Sara Platnick, head of communications at Perplexity, told VentureBeat.

According to her, another example could be gaining insights from meeting with customers. Perplexity would be able to instantly get the details and focus of the conversation from the connected CRMs.

Notably, by leveraging Carbon Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) workflows, Perplexity makes enterprise search more accessible, saving companies the hassle of building their own RAG pipelines from scratch.

“By finding and interpreting proprietary data with Perplexity and Carbon, companies can address a number of multifaceted gen AI use cases. We found that the leading users are most focused on customer service, document processing, image processing and recommendation tools,” Kevin Petrie, vice president of research at BARC US, told VentureBeat.

Execution will be key

Getting carbon is just the beginning. The real key will be execution, or how smoothly and securely the startup’s technology is integrated. After all, we’re talking about proprietary data from some of the most critical knowledge repositories that businesses maintain.

“Companies are rightly aware that they are exposing their intellectual property to the public. So Perplexity and Carbon will need to provide controls to ensure companies can keep their data inside their own firewalls. They have no interest in sharing secrets or training a public model to mimic their intellectual property,” Petrie added.

Regarding Perplexity, Platnick noted that “all information from internal and private sources on the engine is encrypted, as is all data transmitted and stored in Carbon’s data connectors.” She also pointed out that the company has additional protections in place to ensure that private documents remain private and not accessible to unauthorized users.

There is currently no specific timeline for Carbon’s integration with Perplexity. However, the startup will retire its managed API on March 31, 2025. Existing customers using the API have already been notified of offboarding, with the Carbon team assisting them with the transition.