Perplexity CEO Sets 2028 IPO Target as OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX Prepare Listings

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas says the AI search company is targeting a public offering in 2028, a timeline he described as fixed regardless of how the market receives the wave of high-profile listings already in motion from OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX.

"Agnostic of these two companies, we were planning for something in 2028 so that still remains the case," Srinivas said in an interview with CNBC that aired Tuesday.

The remarks represent a more definitive framing of comments Srinivas has made previously, in which he indicated the company had no intention of going public before 2028.

The context shaping his comments is significant. OpenAI announced Monday that it had confidentially filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission to go public. Anthropic made a similar confidential SEC filing last week. SpaceX is also preparing a listing, with that offering expected to serve as an early signal of how investors will respond to the broader cohort of high-profile AI and tech companies entering public markets.

Anthropic was last valued at nearly $1 trillion, according to prior reporting. Both Anthropic and OpenAI are considered frontier labs — companies whose models are regarded as among the leading in the field.

Srinivas said he expects the upcoming offerings to be well received, though he acknowledged the stakes. "I certainly think there will be ripple effects if they don't go well, like there is no sugar coating on that," he told CNBC. "The SpaceX IPO this week will definitely be a leading indicator to how Anthropic or OpenAI will go out."

He added: "I think it's important for the AI industry that these IPOs go well, and I actually think they will go well, because they're doing well."

The CEO also weighed in on investor scrutiny of the valuations assigned to frontier labs, arguing that both Anthropic and OpenAI deserve their high figures because of their position at the cutting edge of model development. He cautioned, however, that a sustained pause in capability advances could become a problem. "If for six months you don't see a model capability advance from one of these two companies, then it's a problem for them," Srinivas said.

On the question of enterprise AI spending, Srinivas addressed the trend known as "tokenmaxxing" — a pattern in which employees ramp up AI usage primarily to demonstrate productivity rather than out of genuine need. He said users ultimately want the best tool for a given task, not simply the most-used one.

Perplexity's product draws on models from multiple providers and, according to Srinivas, selects the appropriate model for each task based on both capability and cost. "If there is an open source model that gets the job done 90% of the time, I'd probably use that if it's 10 to 20 times cheaper than the frontier model," he said.

The remarks come as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly acknowledged in a company live stream that AI costs have become a "huge issue," with enterprise customers increasingly focused on what they are spending.

"The future is still awesome for frontier intelligence, but it's not going to be mindless spending, as we saw in the last few months," Srinivas said.

With three of the most closely watched private technology companies now at various stages of the IPO process, the coming months will test whether public market investors are prepared to absorb valuations built on AI's long-term promise — and how that appetite, in turn, shapes Perplexity's own path toward a 2028 debut.

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