Perplexity acquires Seattle startup Carbon

Perplexity has acquired Carbon, a small Seattle-based startup that connects AI systems to external data sources. CEO Aravind Srinivasan said the move will allow Perplexity to search through your files and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and other enterprise apps by early 2025. Carbon specializes in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which enables large language models to access information from external databases before generating answers. By bringing in Carbon's technology and employees, Perplexity may be opening the door to launching an enterprise search product.