Perplexity is sticking with a 2028 IPO while OpenAI and Anthropic race to list this year

Perplexity AI plans to go public in 2028, and CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC that timeline has not changed because OpenAI and Anthropic are now filing for IPOs. “Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028, so that still remains the case,” Srinivas said.

The statement positions Perplexity as the deliberate outlier in a market where the three largest AI companies are all racing to list within months of each other.

The case for waiting

OpenAI filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday at an $852 billion private valuation. Anthropic filed last week at $965 billion. SpaceX lists on Thursday at roughly $1.8 trillion.

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Srinivas argued the market can absorb several AI names at once, but his decision to stay private suggests a different calculation. A 2028 listing lets Perplexity watch how the first wave is received, build a longer financial track record, and enter at a moment when the initial euphoria has either been validated or corrected.

Where Perplexity sits

The company was last valued at roughly $20 billion after a September 2025 funding round. It has raised approximately $900 million in total, a fraction of what OpenAI ($122 billion in a single round) and Anthropic ($30 billion) have secured.

Perplexity’s product is an AI-powered answer engine that competes with Google Search, ChatGPT, and Claude. Its enterprise tier is priced at $40 per user per month. Revenue figures have not been publicly disclosed for 2026, though the enterprise AI market it operates in is growing rapidly.

The risk of going second

The conventional wisdom is that being first to market in an IPO window captures the most investor capital. If OpenAI and Anthropic absorb the available appetite for AI stocks in 2026, Perplexity may find a smaller pool waiting in 2028.

The counter-argument is that going later with a proven business model and clear unit economics is more durable than going early at a speculative valuation. Bending Spoons, which filed for its own IPO this week, waited years to build a financial record before approaching public markets.

What 2028 depends on

Perplexity’s IPO thesis rests on two assumptions. First, that the AI search market will be large enough by 2028 to support a standalone public company. Second, that Perplexity will still be differentiated enough to claim a meaningful share of it.

Both are open questions. Google has been embedding AI into Search aggressively, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT is already the default AI interface for hundreds of millions of users. Srinivas is betting that patience beats urgency. By 2028, the market will tell him whether he was right.