To see how far Indians have risen in the United States, look no further than what is perhaps the biggest story in the tech world at the moment.
In a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Anand Srinivas, CEO of AI start-up Perplexity, has offered to buy the Internet behemoth’s Chrome browser at $34.5 billion. The Perplexity offer has come amid speculation about United States District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Amit Mehta giving a ruling any day of this week in an antitrust decision against Google.
There is a possibility that the judge could force the tech giant to sell its web browser to reduce the company’s monopoly on the internet search engine market.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company has told WSJ that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full. A Perplexity spokesperson, Jesse Dwyer, told The New York Times that outside investors had agreed to back the deal if Google agrees.
In January this year Perplexity had also offered to merge with TikTok’s US operations.
The latest offer includes commitments to maintain Chrome’s underlying open-source engine, Chromium, with a $3 billion investment, and to keep Google as the default search engine for Chrome users.
In his letter to Pichai, the Perplexity CEO said the offer “was designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy in highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable, independent operator.”
The estimates of Chrome enterprise values vary from $20 billion to $50 billion.
The AI start-ups have attempted to throw a challenge to Google’s search engine using technologies like chatbots to deliver search results in short sentences instead of just throwing up links in a matter of seconds. The deal could be a gamechanger for Perplexity which wants to utilise Chrome to thwart the challenge from Microsoft, OpenAI and others.
On August 8, 2024 Judge Mehta of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia in his nearly-300 page judgment had held Google’s agreements with major original equipment manufacturers required Google to be the default search engine and thus Google had violated antitrust rules to maintain its dominance in the search market.
Judge Mehta held that the agreements led to anticompetitive impact as they foreclosed a substantial share of the markets, deprived Google’s rivals of sufficient user data to compete and reduced the incentives of rivals and nascent competitors from investing and innovating in the markets.
The Justice Department is reported to be keen on the federal court forcing Google to sell its Chrome browser and divest Chrome and share search results and ads with rivals “would create more competition.”
Google has approximately three billion users worldwide, a dream user base for AI companies.
According to NYT, the US government told Judge Mehta Google’s monopoly – it controls about 90 per cent of the search market – could not be remedied without forceful structural changes to the company, and without this remedy, Google will dominate the AI market.
The Indian diaspora’s contributions to Silicon Valley are well documented. Back in 2012, A study led by Indian-American entrepreneur Vivek Wadhwa and published by the Kauffman Foundation had found that Indian immigrants were the leading group of new entrepreneurs in the US.
Indians have also starred in America’s judicial system before, with the best example being Preet Bharara the then Manhattan district attorney who sent the business icon Rajat Gupta to jail.
The Perplexity-Google tango once again underscores how far Indians have risen in the US.