Conor Grennan’s Post

BREAKING: Perplexity ($9B valuation) just bought a 4-person startup called Carbon - and this is sneaky brilliant. Check this out, because the AI race is exploding beyond chatbots, and Perplexity just made a power move: THE DEAL Perplexity didn't buy Carbon for their massive team (it's FOUR people) or their huge customer base. They bought them because this tiny team figured out how to let AI access your personal files while keeping them private and secure. Think about how crazy AI is: A 4-person team in Seattle got acquired by a $9B company because they solved one specific problem really well. WHY THIS IS BRILLIANT Perplexity started as an AI search company. Then they added chat. Now with Carbon, they can add your personal files - Notion pages, Google Docs, Slack messages, all of it. It's their second acquisition ever (after Spellwise in 2023). They're not out there buying everything - they're competing against Google, they gotta keep some powder dry. THE BIGGER PICTURE What's really interesting is the timing. Perplexity is quietly building an AI that can actually understand your work context. And this isn't just about searching your files - as critical as that is. It's about getting personal. It's about AI that understands YOUR world, not just THE world. WHY THIS MATTERS FOR ENTERPRISE Think about your current workflow: -Knowledge scattered across 10 different tools -Hours just finding the right information -Team keeps asking the same questions -New employees take time to get up to speed Carbon's technology basically says: "What if we could solve all of that at once?" THE TECHNICAL BRILLIANCE Carbon figured out how to do this without copying all your data, which is wild. Their RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) technology lets AI access information while keeping it in place. It's like having an assistant who can read any document you own, but doesn't need to take it home. I don't even get that. THE COMPETITIVE LANDSCAPE Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are all working on similar problems. But Perplexity just showed us something super cool: Sometimes the best solution comes from a tiny team thinking differently about the problem. WHAT TO WATCH FOR Early 2025 is when we'll see these features launch. Here's what to look for: -How smoothly they integrate with existing tools -Whether they can maintain speed with all this extra context -If they can keep the interface simple despite the complexity -How they handle privacy and security