Perplexity’s Carbon integration will make it easier for companies to connect their data with AI search

2024 was a record year for confusion. The AI ​​search startup founded by former DeepMind and OpenAI researcher Aravind Srinivas has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in its latest funding round allegedly Valuing the company at $9 billion – and introduced several notable features including pages, roomsand innovative shopping experiences.

These developments have cemented Perplexity’s reputation as an “AI-first” knowledge discovery engine and differentiated it from traditional search giants such as Google and Bing, which are integrating AI capabilities into their existing search engines.

However, the journey is far from over.

With competition increasing, Perplexity is expanding its offering with a new addition to its portfolio: carbon. The company has just acquired For an undisclosed sum, this startup aims to close the “data gap” that companies encounter in AI searches and optimize the knowledge discovery process in their workflows.

Carbon has developed a comprehensive retrieval framework that streamlines the process of connecting external data sources to LLMs. Users can tap the Carbon Universal API or SDKs to synchronize their data sources and retrieve the data for use with LLMs. It offers native integrations with 20+ data connectors and supports 20+ file formats including text, audio, and video files.

The Growing Scope of AI Search

From individuals to business users, almost everyone is now using AI search as part of their workflows. The idea behind the technology is pretty simple: you don’t have to go through a ton of links and content to find relevant insights and information. Instead, you will receive the information as a direct response to your request.

Perplexity believes in this approach, leveraging a range of large language models to retrieve information from the web and simplify the way users work. It even allows teams to extract information from their personal or work files such as PDFs and Word documents.

But here’s the thing. The Internet hosts public information, and uploading internal files – PDFs, conversations, images – individually is not possible for business users working with large amounts of proprietary data. This affects the quality of the answers as they remain general and contain important organizational context.

Sanjeev Mohan, former vice president of data and analytics at Gartner Research, pointed out this “data gap,” telling VentureBeat that one of the biggest AI trends for 2025 will be ETL unstructured data. This allows teams to extract and transform data from distributed internal sources, ultimately resulting in their LLMs generating highly relevant and accurate answers.

That’s exactly what Perplexity plans to do by adopting Carbon’s comprehensive, optimized retrieval framework. Perplexity will integrate Carbon’s retrieval engine and connectors into its tech stack, giving search platform users a direct way to integrate their various data sources, from Google Docs and Notion to Hubspot and Slack.

The company says this will expand the pool of knowledge that powers the AI ​​search engine and make its answers more comprehensive, relevant and personalized to users.

What can users expect from Carbon-powered Perplexity?

While Perplexity has just acquired Carbon and the integration is ongoing, it’s easy to imagine how the additional data connectors will improve the workflows of enterprise teams using the AI ​​search engine.

For example, if someone needs to reschedule a release and find out the latest deadline and guidelines set by their team, Perplexity can analyze all the data in Google Docs, Notion, and Slack – and make the necessary correlations – to find the information, that answer the question.

Essentially, you would no longer have to worry about stitching together context from the web, individual apps, and messages. The platform does everything itself to provide the answer.

“The notable advantage of this setup is that our technology can find the answer without you having to pinpoint the document/database that stores that information,” Sara Platnick, communications director at Perplexity, told VentureBeat.

Another example, she said, could be gaining insights from customer meetings. Perplexity would be able to retrieve the details and focus of the conversation from connected CRMs in no time.

Especially through the use of carbon On-demand extended generation (RAG) workflows, Perplexity makes enterprise search more accessible and saves companies the hassle of building their own RAG pipelines from scratch.

“By searching and interpreting proprietary data with Perplexity and Carbon, companies can address a range of complex use cases of genetic AI. “We find that the leading users are most focused on customer service, document processing, image processing and recommendation engines,” Kevin Petrie, vice president of research at BARC US, told VentureBeat.

Execution will be key

The acquisition of Carbon is just the beginning. The real key lies in the implementation, i.e. how seamlessly and securely the startup’s technology is integrated. After all, it is proprietary data from some of the most important knowledge repositories that companies maintain.

“Companies are rightly cautious about making their intellectual property available to the public. Therefore, Perplexity and Carbon must provide governance controls that ensure companies can keep their data within their own firewalls. They have no interest in sharing secrets or training a public model to imitate their intellectual property,” Petrie added.

From Perplexity, Platnick noted that “all information from internal and private sources is encrypted on the engine, as is all data transmitted and stored in Carbon’s data connectors.” She also noted that the company has additional protections in place to ensure that private documents remain private and are not accessible to unauthorized users.

There is currently no specific timeline for Carbon’s integration with Perplexity. However, the startup will stop operating its managed API on March 31, 2025. Existing customers using the API have already been notified for offboarding, with the Carbon team supporting them through the transition.