Zuni (by Old House Labs Inc.) is a Chrome sidebar AI copilot built for knowledge workers who refuse to leave their existing tools. Rather than forcing users into yet another chat interface, Zuni sits quietly in the browser sidebar, reads the open tab, understands the Gmail inbox, and surfaces actionable intelligence in real time. Founded in 2024 by Cambridge alumni George Seabridge and Will Taylor (a 2x YC founder), Zuni is backed by Y Combinator (S24) and offers access to the world's leading AI models — GPT-4o, Claude 3.7 Sonnet, Gemini 2.0 Flash, DeepSeek R1, and more — all in one place, without switching apps.
Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI company that built the world's leading 'answer engine' ? replacing traditional link-based search with real-time, AI-generated responses that cite their sources. Founded in August 2022 by four AI researchers from OpenAI, Meta, Databricks, and Quora, Perplexity has grown from a scrappy post-ChatGPT prototype to a $20B+ company with 45 million monthly active users, over $1.7B in total funding, and a product suite spanning a conversational search engine, a developer API platform, and the Comet AI browser.