SK Telecom invests $10M into AI startup Perplexity

SK Telecom, a leading Korean mobile carrier, said Thursday it will invest $10 million in U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity to cooperate on AI search services.

The corporate logo of SK Telecom [YONHAP]

SK Telecom, a leading Korean mobile carrier, said Thursday it will invest $10 million in U.S. artificial intelligence (AI) startup Perplexity to cooperate on AI search services.

Perplexity also plans to invest in Global AI Platform, an AI service developing arm of SK Telecom in Silicon Valley, according to the Korean company. But it did not elaborate on the financial terms of the U.S. side.

SK Telecom and Perplexity signed a strategic partnership during the Mobile World Congress in February to boost their cooperation in the AI search engine business.

Through the mutual investments, Perplexity plans to help SK Telecom develop an AI search engine for the personal AI assistant service that the Korean company is currently developing for the global market, as well as its existing service, A.

To support this collaboration, SK Telecom will provide Korean-language data and cultural content to Perplexity to help the startup fine tune its large language model and make its search solution more sophisticated.

Perplexity's service is considered a challenger to Google, the world's biggest search engine, as it uses generative AI models to answer users' inquiries swiftly and with sources of information.

"Based on the cooperation between the two companies, we plan to strengthen the search capabilities of A. and release a globally top-level AI personal assistant service," Lee Jae-shin, SK Telecom's head of global business development, said.

Meanwhile, the Korean company said it plans to provide the paid version of Perplexity's search service to its subscribers for free for one year.

Yonhap