Perplexity acquires Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals

Read cva social media platform for professionals that competes with LinkedIn, has been acquired by the AI-powered search engine Perplexity.

As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin winding down operations on Friday. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts and messages, until May 16.

“We have long admired perplexity and believe that great things happen when knowledge of the world is made more open and accessible,” reads a post on Read.cv’s blog. “In that spirit, we are excited to join the design and engineering team at Perplexity to continue on our shared mission of exploration and discovery.”

Today I am excited to share this @read_cv joins the team at @perplexity_ai in its mission to make the knowledge of the world more accessible to all. This is incredibly bittersweet for us, as the start of this new chapter will mark the end of our time with @read_cv.

Has… pic.twitter.com/6CUinOEGsi

– andy chung (@_andychung) January 17, 2025

A spokesperson for Perplexity confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch via email, but did not provide additional details.

“We are excited to have the Read.cv team join Perplexity,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a post on X. “The team is incredibly capable of designing and building consumer and social experiences and we look forward to working with them. many exciting new directions!”

Read.cv, which was founded in 2021 by Andy Chung, formerly a product designer at Facebook, Mozilla and Salesforce, offered a range of tools that allowed users to share their resume and chat with other professionals in their industries. Read.cv also offered capabilities aimed at organizations, such as team profiles and the ability to post job listings and perform candidate searches.

More recently, Read.cv launched Sites, a feature that allows users to publish a personal website with their Read.cv profile. Users could also get a “.cv” domain from Read.cv and connect it to their profile if they wanted.

Read.cv says it plans to migrate “.cv” domains from January 31 to its partners at Hello.cv, where users can continue to manage them.

Perplexity plans for West Berkeley-based Read.cv, which had about three employees and was supported by funding from F7 Ventures and Fanjul Capital, are not clear. But Perplexity invested more and more in enterprise-focused functionality last summer launch an enterprise plan with user management, single sign-on, and more.

The moves could be in part at the behest of the VCs backing Perplexity, who are no doubt eager to see an early return. The perplexity has reported has raised more than $500 million in capital from investors including Institutional Venture Partners, and is said to be valued at $9 billion.

Read.cv is Perplexity’s third acquisition after its purchase Coalwhich specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources. In 2023, Perplexity purchased Spellwise, that the CEO was brought in to develop Perplexity’s mobile app.