Prediction marketplace Polymarket partners with Perplexity to show news summaries
Prediction marketplace Polymarket, which lets users bet on real-world events, is partnering with AI-powered search engine Perplexity to display news summaries of events.
When users click on an event on Polymarket, they will now see a summary of news related to the event based on search results from Perplexity. There’s also a search box that you can use to ask more questions.
Polymarket is also creating a column using Perpelixty’s Pages feature (it lets users create sharable pages from search results) that will be displayed on Perplexity’s Discover page. Perplexity said it will explore more third-party partnerships to feature content on its Discover section.
Perplexity will also use some data from Polymarket, such as election trends, to show visuals in the answers. These visuals will be generated using another AI platform, Tako.
“Polymarket has become a go-to destination for people looking to access high signal trusted information on an increasingly noisy web. We see Perplexity as a company engaged in a similar mission, and so investing in deepening our partnership makes perfect sense,” Shayne Coplan, founder and CEO of Polymarket, told TechCrunch over email.
This tie-up follows a similar partnership for Polymarket that saw Substack letting writers embed prediction data from the prediction marketplace in their posts. Polymarket also recently launched its own Substack newsletter, called Oracle.
For Perplexity, Polymarket will be an API customer, and the AI search engine will generate revenue from API calls made by users looking at events and asking questions on the prediction marketplace.
Dmitry Shevelenko, chief business officer at Perplexity, told TechCrunch that while the company is primarily targeting consumers as well as knowledge workers in enterprise settings, increasingly more developers are using the Perplexity API.
“The API business is not a priority for us as we are a consumer-focused company. But still, API usage is growing, with more than 25,000 developers using our API. We have a unique offering that pulls in answers via different internet sources,” Shevelenko said.
“The way we think about API right now is that it’s a means to grow the brand, but not the end.”
He noted that apart from enterprises, publishers are using Perplexity’s API to let users search articles on their platforms. Other use cases include banks looking to run Know Your Customer (KYC) processes; marketing tools; and financial services looking to get up-to-date information.
News outlets have criticized Perplexity for plagiarizing their work and scraping the web by ignoring “robots.txt” instructions on websites. The company has since promised to display citations prominently, and has also partnered with media outlets through an ad revenue-sharing program.
Shevelenko didn’t share specifics of how many people click on the sources displayed alongside search results on Perplexity, but he said the number is in “double-digit percentage.”
Perplexity, backed by NEA, IVP, Sequoia and Jeff Bezos, last raised $63 million at a valuation of $1 billion in March. A month later, TechCrunch reported that the startup was looking to raise $250 million at a valuation between $2.5 billion and $3 billion.
