Arvind Srinivas's Perplexity Inks $750 Million Deal for Microsoft Cloud
By Reuters | 30 Jan, 2026

The Indian American's AI startup has seen skyrocketing growth in the use of its "answer engine".

AI startup Perplexity has signed a $750 million agreement with Microsoft to use its Azure cloud service, Bloomberg News reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the matter.

The three-year deal will allow Nvidia-backed Perplexity to run a range of AI models through Microsoft's Foundry program, including systems from OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI, the report said.

"Perplexity has chosen Microsoft Foundry as its primary AI platform for model sourcing under a new multi-year agreement," a Microsoft spokesperson told Reuters.

Perplexity did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

A Perplexity spokesperson told Bloomberg News that it was partnering with Microsoft "for access to frontier models from X, OpenAI and Anthropic".

The spokesperson told Bloomberg Perplexity has not shifted spending from Amazon Web Services, the startup's main cloud provider, as part of the Microsoft deal.

Amazon sued Perplexity last year over the startup's "agentic" shopping feature, which uses automation to place orders for users, saying it covertly accessed Amazon customer accounts and disguised automated activity as human browsing.

Perplexity was co-founded in 2022 by CEO Arvind Srinivas, 31, who was born and raised in Chennai, India. Srinivas got his BS and MS in electrical engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras before moving to the US in 2017 to pursue a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley. 

As of the end of 2025 Perplexity was valued at $9 billion.  It has received funding from Nvidia, Amazon and Softbank’s Vision Fund 2. 

(Reporting by Mihika Sharma in Bengaluru; Editing by Pooja Desai and Mrigank Dhaniwala; Further reporting and editing by Goldsea Staff)