While the tech world celebrates Perplexity’s $18 billion valuation for broad-spectrum AI search, a focused challenger is quietly dominating where it matters most: the high-stakes world of investment management and capital raising.
Founded by battle-tested industry veterans, Octum launched with surgical precision into the financial services sector. While established players like Perplexity (founded 2022, now valued at $18bn after a $100M funding extension) cast wide nets across multiple use cases, Octum’s laser focus is delivering outsized results where billions of dollars are actually moved.
The numbers don’t lie: Our investor-matching and entity intelligence platform is demolishing accuracy benchmarks in live demonstrations. Financial teams are witnessing precision that transforms how they identify opportunities, connect with the right investors, and accelerate deal flow. Perplexity is pulling in news sources and then cannot find the data.
Screenshot image of Perplexity AI, extracted August 2025.
Octum’s response actually gives the custodian for that entity.
Screenshot of Octum from August 2025.
Our next query was Get me a list of China family offices that invest in global hedge funds. To get a list of Octum’s matches with contact people, please respond back.
We cap AI/Octum matches at 10 and we also match the right contacts (finding the right people). We were able to get a sizable list of China family offices that invest in global head funds.
Screenshot from Perplexity AI from August 2025
With regard to Perplexity AI (we used their DEEP THINK functionality), out of 10, the only correct one that we can verify is Blue Pool Capital (which is heavily sourced in news sources) and they give a very basic response for each one. The rest of the 10 Perplexity came up were incorrect.
But that is what one gets when they pull from news sources that ARE NOT vetted. Garbage in – Garbage out.
The responses include a real estate fund manager, private equity funds, a European family office (not China), etc.
The conversation always starts with “How do you compare to Perplexity?” It ends with “When can we get started?”
Octum isn’t just entering the AI space, we are redefining what AI can do for the financial world.
