Welcome to See King Alpha's Wall Street breakfast, where we cover the top news for investors every morning.

Good morning. Today is Monday, October 21st. I'm Julie Morgan.

Perplexity AI is looking to raise more money.

Starboard turns its attention to Kenview,

and Spirit Airlines is up more than 50% in pre-market action.

Artificial Intelligence startup perplexity AI has begun fundraising talks

in which it looks to more than double its valuation to $8 billion or more.

The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday citing people familiar with the matter that

the NVIDIA backed startup has told investors that it is looking to raise about 500 million

dollars in the latest funding round. Perplexity declined to comment.

Perplexity has ambitions to chip away at Google's dominance in the search arena,

utilizing generative AI to answer queries. The startup does not have its own AI model

and instead uses a combination of existing large language models such as open

AI's chat gPT and medas llama and builds upon them.

The Jeff Bezos back company has started shifting its business model from subscription to advertising,

which is more in line with how Google generates revenue.

Perplexity search engine reportedly answered about 250 million questions in July, compared to 500 million through the entirety of 2023.

The Wall Street Journal added that the AI startups estimated annualized revenue

based on recent sales is currently about 50 million dollars. The company has

raised three rounds of funding in the past year with its valuation jumping from one to three billion

dollars after its last funding round in May.

UBS announced the sale of its 50% stake in Swiss card to his joint venture partner

...