• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer, Yesterday

Perplexity has extended a partnership with PayPal and Venmo in a deal that could increase Comet browser users by millions. 

The agreement potentially creates a counter-monopoly play -- a business strategy where a company or group of competitors takes aggressive action to disrupt or challenge the dominant position of a monopolist. With this scenario, an AI-powered search competitor could potentially scale to challenge Google's dominance.

The partnership gives PayPal and Venmo customers in the U.S. -- and for future international markets --  access to Perplexity’s Comet AI-powered browser without waiting in line for the company to add users.

It also provides a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro, and gives Perplexity access to millions of new users.

Agreements like these will likely give AI startups a boost as they attempt to compete with Google and other large artificial intelligence (AI) search and browser companies.

PayPal, which continues to find ways to add new users, increased its number of active accounts by 2% year-over-year and 0.4% sequentially to 438 million in the second quarter of 2025. About 1.7 million new accounts were added in the quarter. 

Perplexity, a Nvidia- and Jeff Bezos-backed startup, will have access to many of those PayPal and Venmo customers as it looks to take on OpenAI and Google in the AI-powered search and browser markets.

The Comet browser launched in July, offers an AI assistant with summaries of search results, product comparisons, and other features.

Perplexity presented the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) with an offer as a remedy in Google’s monopoly case, which was settled on Tuesday. It attempted to purchase Google’s Chrome browser in the event that the Alphabet company had to divest it as part of the outcome.

U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta declined the request by the DOJ to force Google to divest Chrome.

PayPal’s promotion is part of its new subscription hub, where users manage their recurring PayPal or Venmo payments.

Users also get a $50 credit when they link and pay for three subscriptions using the hub.