Perplexity Founder to Startups: Big Tech Will Steal Your Breakthroughs—Here’s How to Fight Back

Silicon Valley's open secret just got a public warning shot. Perplexity's CEO dropped truth bombs for emerging founders at a 2025 tech summit—your innovations are already on Big Tech's copy-paste radar.

The Innovation Heist Playbook

Watch any 'disruptive' startup. The pattern's predictable: scrappy team cracks a niche, gains traction... then wakes up to find Amazon's launched a carbon-copy feature before their Series A closes. It's not paranoia—it's their business model.

Survival Tactics for the Little Guy

First-mover advantage? Dead. The new rule: build so fast that clones look obsolete by launch day. Patent like a pharma company. And maybe—just maybe—hope regulators finally notice tech's 'competition theater' while VCs still pretend to care about antitrust.

Meanwhile in Menlo Park, Meta's already training LLaMA 4 on your pitch deck. But hey—at least the corporate acquisition exits still juice those VC returns, right?

Perplexity flags monopolistic tactics could cost users the “browser war III”

Perplexity first launched as an “answer engine” delivering concise, web‑search–powered responses. When it went live in December 2022, most bots could only draw on their static training data.

Three months later, Google’s Bard (now called Gemini) arrived with live internet queries, ChatGPT followed in May 2023, and Claude gained real‑time search in March 2025.

Not long after, Perplexity’s head of communications, Jesse Dwyer, told that larger firms don’t just replicate your features but will “do everything they can to drown your voice.”

On July 9, Perplexity rolled out its Comet browser, coinciding with a Reuters report that OpenAI is building a rival web browser.

In a follow‑up, Dwyer argued that browser battles should favor consumers and warned that if users lose “Browser War III,” it’ll be because of monopolistic tactics from an “everything company.” He added that whatever OpenAI ships will be no different from Google’s approach.

Srivinas’ warning also aligns with how Meta is aggressively bringing AI talent to the company to outbid rival companies, like OpenAI and Google, as part of its strategy to catch up in the rapidly evolving AI space.

Last month, a report by CNBC said that Meta Platforms quietly approached Perplexity AI about a potential acquisition before moving forward with its $14.3 billion commitment to Scale AI.

Those preliminary discussions never reached agreed financial terms, and Perplexity ultimately declined to pursue the offer. At the time, Perplexity had just closed a funding round valuing it at roughly $14 billion.

Zuckerberg rolled out some of the most aggressive talent packages in tech history. As one of the “Magnificent Seven,” it’s dangling signing bonuses of up to $100 million to entice top AI experts away from competitors such as OpenAI.

Reports also indicate Zuckerberg personally reached out to hundreds of engineers and researchers in recent months, contacting them directly via email and WhatsApp.

Cryptopolitan Academy: Want to grow your money in 2025? Learn how to do it with DeFi in our upcoming webclass. Save Your Spot