s tech giants set their sights on enterprise customers, Perplexity might be targeting a younger demographic.

The AI search firm announced on Thursday that it’s partnering with Snap to integrate its answer engine into Snapchat. As part of the deal, Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over the course of a year through a combination of cash and equity, with the companies expecting revenue from the partnership in 2026. 

“Millions of people connect and discover the world through Snapchat,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in the announcement. “By bringing Perplexity to Snapchat, we’re able to serve that curiosity directly where it occurs.”

For Snap, an AI partnership like this could be a huge benefit. Though the company’s MyAI chatbot has seen solid growth in daily active users, it’s struggled to stand out among rivals like Meta, which also seeks to capture user attention with AI. Partnering with Perplexity could give its AI strategy more legitimacy, helping reposition it as an “AI-enhanced platform” rather than just a social media firm, Ido Caspi, research analyst at Global X, told The Deep View. 

Plus, as Snap has struggled to expand its ad business, “this diversification could reduce Snap’s reliance on cyclical ad revenue and boost margins over time if engagement scales successfully,” said Caspi.

As for Perplexity, this deal could help expose its AI to a large swathe of young users. In the announcement, Snap noted that its user base of 943 million consists 75% of users between the ages of 13 and 34.

However, with $1.5 billion in funding as of its latest round, $400 million is a large chunk of change for Perplexity to cough up. The AI firm may be betting a lot on the pull that Snap has among its users.