Perplexity launches Sonar API: AI search engine opens up enterprise-level access

Perplexity announced on Tuesday the launch of its enterprise-grade API service "Sonar", allowing enterprises and developers to integrate its generative AI search capabilities into their own applications. The service is divided into two versions: basic version Sonar and advanced version Sonar Pro, and supports customers to customize the information source of the AI ​​search engine.

Unlike traditional AI models that only rely on training data, Perplexity emphasizes Sonar's ability to connect to the Internet in real time and obtain information from trusted sources to provide more factual and authoritative answers. It is reported that the video conferencing platform Zoom has taken the lead in accessing the Sonar service, allowing its AI assistant to provide answers based on real-time web searches without the user having to leave the video interface.

When it comes to pricing, Perplexity adopts a very competitive strategy. The basic version of Sonar adopts a fixed price model, charging $5 per 1,000 searches, and $1 per 750,000 words (approximately 1 million tokens) for input and output. The Sonar Pro version offers more detailed answers and more citations, and is priced at $5 per 1,000 searches, $3 per 750,000 words of input, and $15 per 750,000 words of output.

Notably, Perplexity claims that Sonar Pro outperforms industry-leading models such as Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic on the SimpleQA benchmark. The startup, valued at $520 million, currently has annual recurring revenue between $5 million and $10 million and just completed $73.6 million in financing earlier this month. The launch of Sonar API will open up new revenue streams for the company and is expected to further drive business growth.