Perplexity AI, a venture with the backing of business magnate Jeff Bezos, has reportedly embarked on fundraising negotiations. The artificial intelligence (AI) company aims to surge its valuation to $8 billion or even more, as per a report by the Wall Street Journal.

The AI firm has reportedly disclosed to its investors its intention to amass around $500 million in an upcoming funding cycle. This news comes from sources that are closely associated with the situation, as mentioned by the Journal.

The company, which also enjoys the support of Nvidia, generates an estimated annual revenue of nearly $50 million based on its recent sales, as stated in the report. Perplexity AI, however, has not yet provided a response to the request for comments outside of its regular operating hours.

In recent news, the AI startup was served a “cease and desist” notice by the New York Times in October, asking it to refrain from using the newspaper’s content for generative AI application.

The AI firm has previously been under scrutiny by prominent media establishments like Forbes and Wired for allegedly plagiarizing their content. However, Perplexity AI has since initiated a revenue-sharing scheme to alleviate some of the apprehensions voiced by publishers.

The AI company’s search tools are designed to provide users with immediate responses to queries, complete with sources and citations. It operates on a range of extensive language models (LLMs), capable of summarizing and generating information. These models range from OpenAI to Meta’s open-source model Llama.