AI search engine Perplexity is in fund-raising talks and expects to raise around $500 million at an $8 billion valuation, the Wall Street Journal reported.

If a deal takes place on those terms, it would more than double the valuation of Perplexity from the $3 billion valuation at which it raised from SoftBank over the summer. According to the WSJ, the company currently receives about 15 million queries a day and brings in around $50 million in annualized revenue.

Perplexity uses AI to help people search the web in a chatbot-style interface. News publishers have accused the company of unauthorized web scraping and plagiarism, with The New York Times even sending a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and has "no interest in being anyone's antagonist here."

These solicitation speeches come on the heels of OpenAI's announcement of raising a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While OpenAI's ChatGPT product has pushed the chatbot and search engine categories closer together, SearchGPT takes this a notch higher.

A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment on the WSJ report.