Ep 177: Perplexity’s Bid For Google Chrome
- Author
- Joanne Sweeney
- Published
- Wed 27 Aug 2025
- Episode Link
- None
Perplexity made headlines last week by making an unsolicited, all-cash offer of $34.5 billion to acquire Google’s Chrome browser. It wasn’t even up for sale, but owning Chrome would supercharge Perplexity’s AI strategy. Keep listening to find out why.
Chrome has more than three billion users. That’s about 68% of the global browser market. For comparison, Safari sits at around 20%. Everyone else, single digits.
Google’s browser isn’t just a piece of software. It’s a distribution channel for Google Search. So when Perplexity AI sent a formal bid letter to Sundar Pichai offering 34.5 billion dollars in cash, they promised to:
- Keep Chrome open source,
- Invest another 3 billion into Chrome over two years; and
- Even keep Google Search as the default, at least for now.
Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine startup founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, a former OpenAI researcher.
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