In an announcement to users this morning, Visual Electric said they were being acquired by Perplexity—or more accurately, the team that makes Visual Electric will be hired by Perplexity. The service will shut down in the next 90 days.

Today we’re sharing the next step in Visual Electric’s journey: we’ve been acquired by Perplexity. This is a milestone that marks both an exciting opportunity for our team and some big changes for our product.

Over the next 90 days we’ll be sunsetting Visual Electric, and our team will be forming a new Agent Experiences group at Perplexity.

While we’ve seen acquihires and shutdowns in either the AI infrastructure space (e.g., Scale AI) or coding space (e.g., Windsurf), I don’t believe we’ve seen one in the image or video gen AI space have an exit event like this yet. Obviously, The Browser Company announced their acquisition by Atlassian last month.

I believe building gen AI tools at this moment is incredibly competitive. I think it takes an even stronger stomached entrepreneur than in the pre-ChatGPT moment. So kudos for the folks at Visual Electric for having a good outcome and getting to continue to do their work at Perplexity. But I do think this is not the last that we’ll see consolidation in this space.