Perplexity acquires the team behind Sequioa-backed AI design startup Visual Electric (techcrunch.com)

Search startup Perplexity has acquired the team behind Sequoia-backed AI design startup Visual Electric, folding the group into a new "Agent Experiences" team, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas confirmed on X. Financial terms were not disclosed; Visual Electric will shut down its product in 90 days with data export and prorated refunds for subscribers. Founded in 2022 and backed with $2.5M from Sequoia, BoxGroup and Designer Fund, Visual Electric was built by former Facebook, Dropbox, Apple and Microsoft engineers and offered designers an “infinite canvas” for AI-driven image creation, iterative editing and later video generation. For the AI/ML community this is notable as a talent-plus-product play that accelerates Perplexity’s move into multimodal agent interfaces and creative workflows. Visual Electric’s expertise in generative image/video models, canvas-based editing UX, and design-centric iteration could be integrated into Perplexity’s agents to enable richer multimodal outputs, in-context visual editing, and more natural design conversations inside search/assistant experiences. The acquisition signals growing competition around agent-driven creative tooling (alongside players like OpenAI and others) and underscores consolidation pressures on niche creative startups, even as it promises faster productization of advanced visual generation features within conversational AI.