Perplexity's bet on agents is showing up in the numbers, and the company has indicated a timeline for its IPO.
CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that Perplexity has no plans to IPO before 2028 regardless of what Anthropic or OpenAI do with their own filings. He has indicated that, agnostic of those two companies, Perplexity was planning for something in 2028 and that still remains the case.
The reason that timeline feels plausible right now is a product called Computer, the AI agent Perplexity rolled out that handles multi-step work across files, browsers, and enterprise tools instead of just returning search results. Annualized revenue climbed from around $300 million in January to more than $450 million in March, a 50% jump in two months. Sacra puts the April number near $500 million, a 335% year-over-year increase that the research firm ties directly to Computer's launch.
The clearest read on what Computer is actually doing inside companies comes from Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's Chief Business Officer. He told VentureBeat that Computer has been "the single biggest productivity unlock in our entire history as a company," and he explained why with a story. Two hours before the interview he ran a query through Computer inside Slack to pull data he wouldn't have known how to find himself. "I'm not technical, so I don't know how to write SQL. I wouldn't have known where to look that up. If I had to ping one of our data scientists, I would have been waiting hours."
That is the enterprise sales pitch in one sentence. PYMNTS reported that early enterprise customers say Computer has completed the equivalent of 3 years of work in four weeks. Perplexity now claims more than 50,000 organizations on its Enterprise platform.
The harder problem is trust. A techhq analysis of the enterprise push pointed out that selling a curious search tool to consumers is a very different thing from convincing a CISO to let an agent take actions inside your systems. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled before 2027 because of unclear ROI and weak risk controls. Perplexity has the traction. It does not yet have a long enterprise audit history.
The other thing Srinivas has been honest about is what happens above them. If Anthropic or OpenAI stumble on the way to the public markets, AI valuations across the cohort get re-rated. He has said he certainly thinks there will be ripple effects if those IPOs don't go well, and that there is no sugar coating on that.
A year ago Perplexity looked like a clever search product still hunting for a real business. The agent pivot has changed that conversation faster than most people expected, and the 2028 IPO target says the company believes Computer can carry the momentum without piggybacking on whatever happens to the bigger labs. The next twelve months are less about benchmarks and more about whether large companies are actually willing to hand real work over to an agent built by a startup. Search got Perplexity in the door. Whether it stays in the room is up to Computer.
