Perplexity is an AI company best known for its answer engine: rather than returning a list of links, it searches the live web and writes a direct, cited answer. The same capability is available through its API platform, so you can build live web search and grounded answers into your own project.
The Search API gives you real-time, ranked results from a constantly refreshed index. The Agent API lets you build LLM applications that combine models from multiple providers with built-in web search, tool use, reasoning control, and token budgets.
Perplexity was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Investors have included Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Databricks, and as of early 2026 the company reached a valuation of over $21 billion.
Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO. Aravind grew up in Chennai, India, studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras, and earned a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley in 2021. Before founding Perplexity he held research positions at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. His guiding question for the company: what if accessing information felt like talking to a personal research assistant?
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Perplexity is how your project stays current and grounded in the live web. Some ideas on where it fits:
Live facts on top of static law. Cellar gives you the authoritative legal text; Perplexity adds recent news, commentary, and developments around it, so your tool reflects what is happening now.
Useful in combination with: Cellar API, Neo4j.
Search inside an agent. The Agent API lets you give a reasoning model the ability to look things up mid-task, which suits multi-step legal research workflows.
Useful in combination with: NVIDIA / Nemotron, Claude Code.
Cited answers for users. Because results come with sources, you can surface citations in your interface, which matters a lot for legal credibility.
Useful in combination with: Lovable or Momen (frontend).
A form will be provided in advance for participants to receive $50 in API credits. There is no usage limit; if you run out, on-site staff can assist.
Perplexity Cookbook: https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/cookbook
Perplexity docs: https://docs.perplexity.ai/
Console: https://console.perplexity.ai/
API platform overview: https://www.perplexity.ai/api-platform