Perplexity and PayPal will allow AI agents on the Perplexity Pro platform to pay for products, travel bookings, or tickets requested by users.
Perplexity, a popular AI-powered search engine, has partnered with the payment provider PayPal to enable agent-based commerce payments for users of the Perplexity Pro solution.
While basic search on the Perplexity platform is free to use, its Pro offering is a premium subscription plan with advanced features and capabilities. One of those extra benefits is the ability to search and purchase items from select merchants. The feature is currently available exclusively in the U.S.
With the new partnership, American users will get an opportunity to shop with AI agents even more effectively. Starting this summer, the company’s customers will be able to check out instantly with PayPal or Venmo after the platform provides an appropriate product listing, makes a reservation or finds a ticket they asked for.
The whole process, including payment, shipping, tracking, and invoicing, will be managed seamlessly with PayPal’s account linking, secure tokenised wallet, and new passkey checkout options. All these technologies are making it possible to complete the purchase with just one click or query, without needing passwords.
PayPal was chosen as a payment provider for the new initiative, first and foremost due to the public trust it gained over the years. Besides, it has one of the widest customer reach volumes among similar fintech firms. In the U.S., the payment method is particularly popular. PayPal has over 278 million users in the country, over 70% of American adults and more than half of the company’s total user base.
Alex Chriss, President and CEO of PayPal, believes that the partnership opens up new possibilities by enabling conversations to drive commerce in an easy and secure way.
Perplexity is a conversational search engine that combines real-time web data with AI models to provide clear, cited answers and helpful next steps in a single chat. It simplifies research, product comparisons, and trip planning by turning questions into reliable, actionable insights.
Founded in 2022 by former team members of OpenAI, Meta, Quora, Bing, and Databricks, Perplexity handles over 150 million questions weekly. Its popularity in the AI ecosystem keeps growing along with the expansion of the company’s product list.
Among its most recent developments is a proprietary Comet browser for agentic search. The project is still awaiting launch, with users invited to join the waitlist. The browser under development will not simply show the search results, but also compare information, summarise texts, automatically personalise the user experience and perform other agentic AI-powered tasks. Reportedly, the startup is in preliminary talks on raising about $500 million in investments to power its growth.
