Artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity announced on Monday a partnership with identity verification company SheerID, offering free Perplexity Pro premium service for up to two years to over 264 million students worldwide. This move aims to address the challenge of discount fraud faced by AI companies when providing expensive tools to the education sector, and highlights Perplexity's strategic bet on the education market in the increasingly competitive user landscape.

Free Premium Service Targeting Student Users

Under the agreement, students verified by SheerID will be able to use the original $20-per-month Perplexity Pro for free. SheerID's verification platform covers more than 200,000 authoritative data sources across 190 countries and regions, ensuring that all eligible college and higher education students (a total of 264 million people) around the world can access this benefit. Perplexity Pro will provide students with professional features such as citing research, in-depth reports, and interactive AI applications.

This collaboration comes at a time when the use of artificial intelligence among students is increasing rapidly. Data from both companies show that 86% of American students are already using AI tools to assist their studies. However, this rapid growth has also raised concerns about academic integrity and created a strong demand for AI tools specifically designed for educational purposes.

Artificial Intelligence AI Education

SheerID: Advanced Verification Technology Prevents Fraud

Based in Portland, SheerID was founded in 2011 and focuses on helping retailers and service providers solve the challenge of verifying consumer identities, ensuring that only qualified users (such as students, military personnel, or healthcare professionals) can enjoy special discounts.

Rebecca Grimes, Chief Revenue Officer of SheerID, said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat: "We verify our customers' audience data and use these authorized data to enrich brand CRM, thus helping brands effectively attract their most loyal audiences." She emphasized that the platform is designed to provide consumers with a seamless, secure, and convenient experience.

The verification process starts with collecting users' basic information, such as name, date of birth, and university, and SheerID immediately cross-checks it with authoritative data sources. Grimes revealed that the company has established good relationships with these data sources over 14 years of operation. If real-time verification fails, the system moves to document review, where AI analysis and manual verification are combined. Grimes said that secondary verification can typically be completed within three minutes globally.

Perplexity: Gaining Favor in Academia with Accuracy

This collaboration also reflects the growing complexity of fraud in student discount programs. Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's communications director, emphasized that the company's commitment to accuracy is particularly valuable for academic users who need reliable information.

Dwyer said in an exclusive interview with VentureBeat: "For most AI model builders, a certain degree of 'hallucination' is a feature, but for Perplexity, it is a flaw." He pointed out that this characteristic is highly valued by academia, students, and financial professionals.

Dwyer also emphasized that unlike some competitors who use user data for model training, Perplexity does not use customer information for training purposes. "We do not use your data for training, and the model is actually not trained on your data," he said.