Perplexity tender offer at $25B valuation — $1.5B secondary lets early employees liquidate, but the price comp is the headline
Perplexity opened a $1.5B tender offer this week valuing the company at $25B post-money, allowing early employees and seed investors to liquidate up to 18% of vested holdings. The price comp is the headline: $25B for a $400M ARR business implies a 62x revenue multiple, which sets the upper bound for the AI-native search category and reframes the Google-versus-search-startups thesis.
The 62x multiple is high but defensible against the public-market AI comps. Anthropic at $30B run-rate and $380B trades at ~13x, but Anthropic's revenue base is more diversified across enterprise and API. Perplexity's multiple captures the optionality on the search-engine displacement thesis rather than the run-rate alone.
The tender structure is the operational read. By letting employees liquidate now, Perplexity sets a known price floor for the next funding round (the secondary effectively becomes the comparator), avoids the dilution of a primary, and pulls forward retention compensation that would otherwise pressure the option pool. The pattern matches the path Stripe took in its 2024-2025 tender cycle.
The Information — Perplexity $25B tender offer details → · Forbes — Perplexity tender lets early employees liquidate → · PitchBook — AI search valuations after the Perplexity tender →