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Perplexity AI Buys LinkedIn Competitor Read.cv
Perplexity AI, the AI-powered search engine, has acquired Read.cv, a professional social media platform built as a challenge to LinkedIn. The immediate result is not an expansion of Read.cv as an independent service. Read.cv will wind down operations, and users can export their profiles, posts, and messages until May 16.
That makes this less like a conventional platform acquisition, where a larger company buys a growing network and keeps it running, and more like an acqui-hire with product implications. Perplexity is bringing Read.cv’s team into the company while leaving the fate of its consumer-facing service behind. For Read.cv users, the practical concern is preservation: save the work, connections, and conversations that can be exported before the deadline. For Perplexity, the more consequential question is what it sees in Read.cv beyond its existing user base.
Read.cv announced the acquisition in a blog post and said it admired Perplexity’s mission to make knowledge more accessible. Its team will join Perplexity to work on projects aligned with that shared goal. The language is broad, but it points toward a logical overlap. Read.cv was not simply a place to upload a résumé. It was designed around professional identity, work histories, portfolios, peer conversations, and discovery. Perplexity, meanwhile, is organized around finding and synthesizing information.
The connection between those two ideas is real, even if Perplexity has not announced a product that combines them. Professional information is often scattered across personal sites, company pages, job listings, public posts, and documents. A search product aimed at work could benefit from better ways to represent people, teams, expertise, and organizational knowledge. Read.cv’s experience in that territory may matter as much as any individual feature.
What Read.cv Built, and What Users Are Losing
Read.cv was founded in 2021 by former Facebook and Mozilla product designer Andy Chung. It gave professionals a way to share résumés, chat with peers, and explore job opportunities. It also offered organizations tools for team profiles, job postings, and candidate searches.
That mix put Read.cv in direct conceptual competition with LinkedIn, though the products approached professional networking from different angles. LinkedIn has long operated as a large, established professional directory and hiring marketplace. Read.cv leaned into presentation and individual expression: a profile could act less like a standardized employment record and more like an evolving account of someone’s work. For designers, builders, and other professionals who want their online presence to look like their own, that distinction is not cosmetic.
Recently, Read.cv introduced Sites, which let users create personal websites using their Read.cv profiles. Those sites could include a “.cv” domain. The domain element gave the product an additional role: it was not only hosting a professional profile, but also helping users establish a personal home on the web.
Users will now migrate “.cv” domain management to Hello.cv starting January 31. Alongside the May 16 export deadline, that transition is a reminder that a profile platform can become infrastructure for people who depend on it. A résumé may be portable in theory, but its formatting, links, messages, and network context are not always easy to recreate elsewhere. The shutdown therefore lands differently for casual users and for those who used Read.cv as a public-facing work site.
Perplexity has not shared exact plans for Read.cv’s features. That absence is important. It would be premature to assume that Sites, team profiles, hiring tools, or messaging will reappear inside Perplexity. Acquisitions often preserve talent and ideas rather than every visible part of a product. Read.cv users should treat exports and domain migration as the confirmed transition details, not as evidence of a promised replacement.
A Possible Enterprise Fit
Still, Read.cv’s product history fits the direction Perplexity has been taking. Perplexity has been expanding its enterprise capabilities, including internal knowledge search and corporate user management. Those additions suggest the Read.cv acquisition could bolster Perplexity’s offerings for business users.
Enterprise AI is increasingly less about asking a model a clever question and more about whether the system can find the right information inside an organization. That requires context: who owns a project, which team has the relevant expertise, where a document came from, and whether a user should have access to it. Read.cv’s work with team profiles, job postings, candidate searches, and professional identity does not automatically solve those problems. But it sits near them.
There is also a human layer to internal knowledge search that many AI products struggle to address. A good answer is more useful when employees can understand who produced the underlying work or which team is responsible for it. If Perplexity can apply Read.cv’s product sensibility to business search, it may make enterprise information feel less like a pile of disconnected files and more like knowledge connected to people and organizations.
That is an opportunity, not an announced roadmap. Perplexity’s public position remains that specifics are unknown. The acquisition should be judged on what eventually appears in the product, rather than on the most ambitious interpretation of what Read.cv might enable.
Part of a Broader Acquisition Strategy
Read.cv is not Perplexity’s only acquisition. Perplexity previously acquired Carbon, a company specializing in connecting AI systems to external data, and Spellwise, whose technology improved Perplexity’s mobile app. Taken together, the deals suggest a company filling in practical layers around its core AI search experience.
Carbon speaks to the hard problem of reaching data outside a single search interface. Spellwise points to the importance of the mobile app. Read.cv brings experience in professional profiles and organizational tools. None of those areas alone defines Perplexity, but each could make an AI search product more useful in everyday work. Search is only as valuable as the information it can reach and the setting in which people use it.
Perplexity is backed by over $500 million in funding from major investors including Institutional Venture Partners, and it is valued at $9 billion. At that scale, acquisitions can be a way to accelerate product development, add specialized teams, and broaden a user base rather than waiting to build every capability internally. They may also reflect investor pressure to drive returns through new features and expansion.
That pressure is particularly visible in AI search. The category has attracted attention because it promises a different relationship with the web: users ask for answers instead of sorting through a conventional list of links. But turning that attention into a durable business requires more than a strong public search experience. Corporate use cases, managed users, private knowledge, and useful mobile access all matter. Read.cv may be a small piece of that larger effort.
For readers following the wider search contest, SquaredTech previously covered New Web Search Of OpenAI: Taking on Giants Google and Perplexity, published on May 9, 2024. The competitive backdrop helps explain why product talent and adjacent capabilities have become strategically valuable.
The Transition Is Clearer Than the Product Plan
The confirmed details are straightforward: Read.cv will cease operations; exports of profiles, posts, and messages remain available until May 16; and “.cv” domain management moves to Hello.cv starting January 31. What comes after that is much less defined. Perplexity integration of Read.cv’s capabilities is expected to shape future offerings, but the company has not disclosed how.
For now, the acquisition says more about Perplexity’s ambition than its next feature release. It is assembling capabilities around AI-powered information access while moving further into business-oriented products. Whether Read.cv’s influence becomes visible to users or remains largely behind the scenes will determine whether this is remembered as a thoughtful expansion of Perplexity’s enterprise strategy or simply the end of a distinctive LinkedIn rival.
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