Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, has joined the advisory board for Perplexity, a new AI search start-up. Parakhin's move technically puts him in competition with his former employer, as Perplexity competes with Microsoft's Bing Search and Copilot.
Parakhin expressed his excitement to help Perplexity innovate faster. He also shared a fun fact that he had hired Denis Yarats, a member of the Perplexity team, 13 years ago as an IC engineer.
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, announced that they have three new advisors joining Perplexity to help across search, mobile, and distribution. These include Emil Michael, former CBO of Uber, Rich Miner, cofounder of Android, advisor to Google, and Mikhail Parakhin, the former CEO of Bing.
Srinivas praised Parakhin as the world's leading technical expert on search infrastructure and integrating it with LLMs. He expressed that Parakhin's expertise will enable Perplexity to evolve their core answer engine, build in-house search infrastructure, and integrate new AI capabilities.
In an interview with Bloomberg Technology, Srinivas shared that the next step for Perplexity is to strategize on search, build their own index and scale it up to even more users. Parakhin will play a key role in advising on how to shape its search engine.
There are speculations that Parakhin left Microsoft to become an advisor to Perplexity, a company that competes with Microsoft. This came after he stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising weeks ago after Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of AI at Microsoft. However, Parakhin did not respond to inquiries about his departure from Microsoft.
