PerceptiMed, which automates hospital and retail pharmacy services through robotics that dispense pills, has raised $16 million in new funding led by McKesson Ventures.
It’s not just a cloud capacity number – it’s a momentum, stability and serious seat at the table in the AI race kind of number.
Not just the money is what makes this deal intriguing. It’s both the timing and the message. Perplexity has told that AWS is still its cloud provider of choice, but the fact it signed something this big with Microsoft tells you they’re not monogamous to one platform any more.
In today’s AI world, though (and for the last generation or so), this isn’t all that uncommon – compute is expensive as hell, use can spike on you in unpredictable ways and the last thing a company with any AI play wants is to come up about a hundred video cards short of being able to deploy new stuff into production when prices soar again and/or GPU availability tightens.
If you’re curious what’s in this for Microsoft, it’s really quite simple: More AI businesses that are built to reside inside Azure.
Microsoft has been attempting to pitch Azure not just as a cloud provider, but rather the place where AI products are constructed and then deployed at scale.
It’s also been opening doors to a wider array of models via its developer ecosystem, so that Perplexity could perhaps tap into a broader menu of AI tooling and models without having to build everything from the ground up.
Now to the part everyone will argue over (which frankly is half the fun): Does this mean that Perplexity has chosen Microsoft instead of Amazon? Officially, no.
But practically? Perplexity does seem to kind of be hedging. And that’s what you do when you’re smart and in a hurry.
You really don’t “hope” one partner does not become hostile when your entire product depends on compute – you build options.
The deal also comes at a time when Perplexity and Amazon have been at loggerheads over accusations regarding data use associated with Perplexity’s shopping features.
Perplexity has denied liability, but even a dispute like that is enough to make any company think twice about betting its own future entirely on the same provider.
“It’s the equivalent of renting an apartment from someone you’re suing – you can do it, but you probably start looking for listings elsewhere.”
Stepping back, this story is part of a much larger trend: cloud giants becoming AI power brokers. It’s not just model vs model in the next era of AI – it’s infrastructure vs. infrastructure. The chips, the servers and the software stack at some company that has control over them are how AI products win.
Microsoft has been investing heavily in that direction, including significant focus on its AI hardware strategy and a large-scale buildout.
Big deals like this also help justify Microsoft’s spending binge. Investors keep posing the same blunt query: “You’re pumping billions of dollars into AI infrastructure… is it working?”
Partnerships like these are how Microsoft answers without saying a word – you just point at the contract value, and let silence speak on your behalf.
For Perplexity, this isn’t merely a purchase in the cloud. This is an insurance policy of growth. It’s a signal to market that it plans to compete at scale – not scrappily or as an alternative, but as an AI search contender.
And if AI search truly is going to upend the way people find things on the internet, then this deal might register as one of those rare instances in which overnight – or nearly so – the future didn’t change … but definitely took a turn.