Read.cva social networking platform for professionals that rivaled LinkedIn, was acquired by AI-powered search engine Perplexity.
As part of the deal, Read.cv will begin decommissioning on Friday. Users will be able to export their data, including their profiles, posts and messages, until May 16.
“We’ve long admired Perplexity and believe great things happen when the world’s knowledge becomes 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 our shared mission of exploration and discovery.”
Today I am excited to share it @read_cv joins the team at @perplexity_ai in their mission to make the world’s knowledge more accessible to all. This is incredibly bittersweet for us as the start of this new chapter will mark the end of our era with @read_cv.
It has… pic.twitter.com/6CUinOEGsi
— andy chung (@_andychung) January 17, 2025
A representative for Perplexity confirmed the acquisition to TechCrunch via email, but did not elaborate.
“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 skilled at designing and creating consumer and social experiences, and we look forward to working with them in many exciting new directions!”
Founded in 2021 by Andy Chung, previously a product designer at Facebook, Mozilla and Salesforce-owned Quip, Read.cv offered a range of tools that let users share their resumes and chat with other professionals of their industry. Read.cv also offered features aimed at organizations, such as team profiles and the ability to post job listings and conduct candidate searches.
More recently, Read.cv released Sites, a feature that allowed users to publish a personal website using their Read.cv profile. Users could even get a “.cv” domain from Read.cv and link it to their profile if they wanted.
Read.cv says it plans to transfer “.cv” domains starting Jan. 31 to its Hello.cv partners, where users can continue to manage them.
Perplexity’s plans for West Berkeley-based Read.cv, which had about three employees and was supported by Funding from F7 Ventures and Fanjul Capital is unclear. But Perplexity has been increasingly investing in enterprise functionality this past summer launch a business plan with user management, “internal search for knowledge“, and more.
The moves could be made in part at the behest of the VCs backing Perplexity, who are no doubt eager to see a return sooner rather than later. Perplexity has reportedly raised over $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 Carbon, which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources. In 2023, Perplexity got Spellwise, whose CEO was tasked with developing Perplexity’s mobile app.
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