Read.cv, a social media platform for professionals that competes with LinkedIn, has been acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity.
As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin winding down its operations starting Friday. Users can export their data, including profiles, posts, and messages, until May 16th.
Read.cv’s blog says, “We have long admired Perplexity and believe that great things happen when the world’s knowledge becomes more open and accessible.” “In that spirit, we are excited to join Perplexity’s design and engineering team as we continue our shared mission of exploration and discovery.”
Today I’m excited to share that @read_cv has joined the team at @perplexity_ai on our mission to make the world’s knowledge more accessible to everyone. This is incredibly bittersweet for us, as the beginning of this new chapter marks the end of our time with @read_cv.
That’s… pic.twitter.com/6CUinOEGsi
— Andy Chung (@_andychung) January 17, 2025
A Perplexity spokesperson confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch in an email, but declined to provide further details.
“We are excited to have the Read.cv team join Perplexity,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said in a post on We look forward to working with them,” he said in a post to X. Lots of new and exciting directions! ”
Founded in 2021 by Andy Chung, who previously worked as a product designer at Facebook, Mozilla, and Salesforce-owned Quip, Read.cv allows users to share resumes and chat with other professionals in their industry. It offered a variety of tools to help you. Read.cv also provided features aimed at organizations, including the ability to post team profiles, job openings, and perform candidate searches.
Recently, Read.cv launched Sites, a feature that allows users to publish personal websites using their Read.cv profile. If desired, users can also obtain a “.cv” domain from Read.cv and connect it to their profile.
Read.cv says it plans to transition “.cv” domains to Hello.cv’s partners starting January 31st, allowing users to continue managing them.
Perplexity’s plans for Read.cv, which was based in West Berkeley, has about three employees, and was backed by F7 Ventures and Fanjul Capital, are unclear. But Perplexity has been increasing its investment in enterprise features, launching an enterprise plan last summer with user management, “internal knowledge search,” and more.
Part of this move may be at the behest of the VCs backing Perplexity, who no doubt want a quick return. Perplexity has reportedly raised more than $500 million in funding from investors including Institutional Venture Partners, and is valued at $9 billion.
Read.cv is Perplexity’s third acquisition, following the acquisition of Carbon, which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources. In 2023, Perplexity acquired Spellwise and its CEO was appointed to develop Perplexity’s mobile app.
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