Perplexity wants a piece of the AI coding boom. The San Francisco search startup has built an internal coding tool, codenamed “Teammate,” and may launch it publicly later, a person familiar with the matter told Business Insider. Its own engineers have used the tool since May.
The company made its name with an AI search engine that takes on Google. A coding product would push it onto very different ground, closer to Cursor, Anthropic and OpenAI. All three already run widely used coding tools.
What “Teammate” does
Teammate aims to run software projects end to end, according to an internal announcement that Business Insider viewed. “It’s built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services,” the note reads.
Screenshots show engineers handing it real jobs, such as hunting bugs in internal systems. The tool stays model-agnostic, the person said, so it does not sit on any single chatbot. That marks a notable choice, while rivals like Claude Code lean on their makers’ own models.
