(Reuters) – Perplexity ai on Saturday asked TikTok's Chinese parent company ByteDance to allow the U.S. search engine startup to merge with TikTok US and create a new entity combining them with New Equity Partners (WA:), CNBC reported.
TikTok faces a ban in the United States starting Sunday if it does not cut its ties with ByteDance, although President-elect Donald Trump said on Saturday he would likely give the short-video social media platform a 90-day reprieve on Monday.
Perplexity's proposed new structure would allow most of ByteDance's existing investors to retain their equity stakes and would bring more videos to Perplexity, the report said, citing an anonymous source familiar with the situation.
Perplexity ai and TikTok did not immediately respond to requests for comment. New Capital Partners could not immediately be reached.
Perplexity ai believes its bid may be successful as the proposal is a merger rather than a sale, the report added.
Perplexity ai's search tools allow users to get quick answers to their questions, with sources and citations. It is powered by large language models that can summarize and generate information, from OpenAI to the open source Llama model from Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:).
TikTok, which has captivated nearly half of Americans, boosted small businesses and shaped online culture, said Friday it will stop operating in the United States on Sunday unless President Joe Biden's administration provide assurances to companies like Apple (NASDAQ and Google (NASDAQ:) that they will not face enforcement action when the ban goes into effect.
!function(f,b,e,v,n,t,s){if(f.fbq)return;n=f.fbq=function(){n.callMethod? n.callMethod.apply(n,arguments):n.queue.push(arguments)};if(!f._fbq)f._fbq=n;n.push=n;n.loaded=!0;n.version=’2.0′;n.queue=();t=b.createElement(e);t.async=!0;t.src=v;s=b.getElementsByTagName(e)(0);s.parentNode.insertBefore(t,s)}(window, document,’script’,’https://connect.facebook.net/en_US/fbevents.js’);
