June 27 (Reuters) - Japanese technology investor

SoftBank Group Corp's ( SFTBF ) Vision Fund 2 is investing

between $10 million and $20 million in U.S. search startup

Perplexity AI at a valuation of $3 billion, Bloomberg News

reported on Thursday.

SoftBank will make this investment as part of a larger $250

million funding round, the report, said, citing people familiar

with the matter.

The deal hasn't been finalized and its terms could still

change, it said.

SoftBank and Perplexity did not immediately respond to

Reuters' requests for comment.

Perplexity's search tools enable users to get instant

answers to questions with sources and citations. It is powered

by a variety of large language models that can sum up and

generate information, from OpenAI to Meta's open-source model

Llama.

San Francisco, California-based Perplexity AI in January

raised $73.6 million from a group of investors including Nvidia ( NVDA )

and Amazon ( AMZN ) founder Jeff Bezos at a valuation

of $520 million.

The company had earlier said it served more than 500 million

queries in 2023 while spending few marketing dollars.