Perplexity snaps up professional network Read.cv

If you follow digital design or indie web development, you probably know Read.cv. It launched as the anti-LinkedIn: sleek, minimalist, and blessedly free of corporate hustle-culture posts.

That boutique community is now coming to an end. AI search engine Perplexity has officially acquired Read.cv, and the platform has already begun winding down operations.

Users have until May 16 to export their profile information, posts, and messages. For those who bought custom ".cv" domains through the platform's Sites feature, those addresses will migrate to partner Hello.cv starting January 31.

A three-person acqui-hire

Read.cv was founded in 2021 by Andy Chung, a former product designer at Facebook, Mozilla, and Quip. Despite backing from F7 Ventures and Fanjul Capital, the company remained tiny, operating with around three employees.

Over the past three years, the platform expanded from visual resumes into messaging, company team pages, job boards, and candidate search. Most recently, it let people spin up clean personal websites straight from their profiles.

Now, the entire team is moving over to Perplexity's design and engineering unit. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas posted on X that the team brings incredible chops in consumer and social experience design.

This marks Perplexity's third acquisition to date. It previously acquired Carbon to connect AI with external data sources, and bought Spellwise in 2023, whose founder went on to build Perplexity's mobile app.

The push toward the enterprise

Perplexity has reportedly raised more than $500 million and carries a $9 billion valuation. With massive capital from backers like Institutional Venture Partners comes heavy pressure to build real recurring revenue.

Last summer, Perplexity rolled out an enterprise plan packed with team management and internal knowledge search. Buying a crew that spent years perfecting team directories, organizational profiles, and candidate search fits neatly into that roadmap.

Neither company has shared exact product plans yet. But an acqui-hire of this caliber gives Perplexity immediate bench strength in how humans interact with professional data.

Why it matters

For Read.cv's dedicated community of designers and developers, this is a bittersweet shutdown. The platform gave users a rare corner of the internet where professional identity did not feel cringe. Four months of export runway is generous, but the community itself is gone.

For Perplexity, we think this is a remarkably sharp talent grab. As frontier search models commoditize, consumer AI companies will win or lose on interaction design and workflow integration.

Andy Chung and his team know how to make dense organizational information feel effortless to browse. Perplexity needs enterprise knowledge search to feel less like a database terminal and more like a tool people actually want to open every morning.

The real test will be execution. Perplexity is already juggling copyright battles in web search and building out workplace search engines. If it tries to cram social features into an already crowded AI interface, it could easily dilute its core identity.