The San Francisco-based outfit told the Wall Street Journal that a gaggle of venture capitalists are ready to bankroll the deal in full.
Google has kept schtum, which might be because Chrome is currently sitting in the legal crosshairs of US District Judge Amit Mehta. He’s still deciding whether the company should be forced to offload the browser to stop strangling the web search market.
Estimates of Chrome’s value swing from $20 billion to $50 billion, putting Perplexity’s offer in the realm of maybe.
In a letter to Alphabet chief executive Sundar Pichai, Perplexity called its proposal “an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator”.
Perplexity says it will keep Chromium, the open-source guts of Chrome, alive and well. It even promised to leave Google as the default search engine, though users will still be allowed to change it if they’re feeling adventurous.
Google has not said it’s willing to sell. Pichai told the judge earlier this year that losing Chrome or being forced to open up its data would clobber the business, stifle innovation and open up security risks. Chrome runs on more than 60 per cent of browsers worldwide and serves about 3.5 billion users.
Judge Mehta, who already ruled that Google illegally monopolised the search market, is due to decide soon on how to actually fix the mess.
Google wants a softer outcome involving tweaks to its sweetheart deals with Apple, Mozilla and Android handset makers.
Perplexity’s public offer could make that a tougher sell, especially since it signals there are willing buyers.
Most analysts think forcing a sale is unlikely, but Mehta did muse during closing arguments about whether that might be “a little cleaner and a little bit more elegant” than fiddling with contracts and default settings.
Perplexity, for its part, has just launched a browser called Comet and is busy fighting off lawsuits from News Corp subsidiaries. None of that appears to have blunted its enthusiasm for poking Google in the ribs.