Perplexity's founder warns emerging founders that their breakthroughs are likely to be copied by Big tech companies

Aravind Srinivas, the founder of Perplexity, cautioned emerging founders that their breakthroughs are likely to be copied by Big Tech companies.

While addressing attendees at YC’s AI Startup School, Srinivas spoke with a mixed audience of undergraduate, graduate, and Ph.D. students about the obstacles they might face in building AI products, as reported by Business Insider.

He noted that once a startup gains traction, established players often roll out similar capabilities. At Perplexity’s debut, its chatbot had unrestricted web‑crawling, a feature that OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google have since added into their own offerings.

Srinivas opened by stressing that founders must “work incredibly hard” to succeed, then observed it’s typical for deep‑pocketed firms to emulate any idea that shows promise. “If your company can bring in revenue in the hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars, assume a model company will copy it,” he said.

He laid out why this happens. The biggest players often raise capital in the tens of billions, sometimes approaching $50 billion, and then hunt for new ways to monetize that investment.

“They will copy anything that’s good. I think you have to live with that fear,” he added.

Perplexity flags monopolistic tactics could cost users the “browser war III”

Perplexity first launched as an “answer engine” delivering concise, web‑search–powered responses. When it went live in December 2022, most bots could only draw on their static training data.

Three months later, Google’s Bard (now called Gemini) arrived with live internet queries, ChatGPT followed in May 2023, and Claude gained real‑time search in March 2025.

Not long after, Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, told that larger firms don’t just replicate your features but will “do everything they can to drown your voice.”

On July 9, Perplexity rolled out its Comet browser, coinciding with a Reuters report that OpenAI is building a rival web browser.

In a follow‑up, Dwyer argued that browser battles should favor consumers and warned that if users lose “Browser War III,” it’ll be because of monopolistic tactics from an “everything company.” He added that whatever OpenAI ships will be no different from Google’s approach.

Srivinas’ warning also aligns with how Meta is aggressively bringing AI talent to the company to outbid rival companies, like OpenAI and Google, as part of its strategy to catch up in the rapidly evolving AI space.

Last month, a report by CNBC said that Meta Platforms quietly approached Perplexity AI about a potential acquisition before moving forward with its $14.3 billion commitment to Scale AI.

Those preliminary discussions never reached agreed financial terms, and Perplexity ultimately declined to pursue the offer. At the time, Perplexity had just closed a funding round valuing it at roughly $14 billion.

Zuckerberg rolled out some of the most aggressive talent packages in tech history. As one of the “Magnificent Seven,” it’s dangling signing bonuses of up to $100 million to entice top AI experts away from competitors such as OpenAI.

Reports also indicate Zuckerberg personally reached out to hundreds of engineers and researchers in recent months, contacting them directly via email and WhatsApp.

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