Mumbai-based Perplexity Alternative Has 60k+ Users Without Funding
Groq, the AI hardware development company, shared a story on X on how it helped scale an AI-powered search engine platform called Scira AI. This brought to light a made-in-India alternative to the AI search engine startup Perplexity. A 22-year-old Mumbai-based developer, Zaid Mukaddam, is the solo founder of an open-source platform that now boasts over 60,000 monthly users, powering more than 1 million searches. Mukaddam started the project last August, initially called ‘MiniPerplx’, inspired by Perplexity. Ten months ago, the project reached 200 stars on GitHub. The platform currently has 8,400 stars on GitHub. Groq stated that when the platform experienced a surge in internet traffic from 500 to 16,000 overnight in December, Mukaddam was struggling to scale the platform affordably due to rising API costs. “Every search chipped away at Zaid’s savings; he nearly pulled the plug,” the company said, adding that this is when it stepped in to assist him with additional computing resources. The company provided its inference platform, coupled with Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, which helped scale the platform with ‘pinpoint’ citations. 🚨 new @sciraai feature launch!here's what's new?!💰 added a new crypto search group in which you can search for any coin or token prices! powered by @coingecko! more stuff soon!🍀 a better, consistent and accessible sources UI across the web, reddit, academic and extreme… pic.twitter.com/afwGm9zMpg— Zaid (@zaidmukaddam) June 30, 2025 When Mukaddam officially announced MiniPerplx on X last August, his project instantly gained a lot of attention. His announcement post was liked by the official account of Shadcn, the user interface component library, and Vercel’s CEO, Guillermo Rauch. “Getting 14,000 impressions was huge for me and showed people were interested in what I was building,” he said, adding that he was inspired to build an alternative to Perplexity. “My thoughts on Perplexity AI: being an AI search engine and giving premium features in its Pro plan doesn’t make any sense as most of them are very basic and could be better,” Mukaddam said in a blog post, outlining his journey. He started building the platform on top of Vercel’s SDK, which was the natural choice for creating an AI search engine. Today, the platform is powered by various frameworks, including Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Shadcn/UI, OpenWeather, and others. The platform utilises multiple AI models to answer user queries, in addition to using Tavily’s API to search the web across various topics. It also uses Exa AI, an AI platform that pulls and analyses content from any URL using live crawling features, and searches for information across academic papers and YouTube videos. Scria AI can also gather information from social media platforms like X and Reddit, providing detailed insights across various themes, including entertainment, finance, travel, and more. It can also perform several code-related analyses and tasks. Recently, Scria AI was accepted into the Vercel AI accelerator, which assists emerging founders and AI builders to scale their projects. It provides access to AI platforms and resources while allowing builders to interact with industry leaders and investors.
The open-source project, called Scria AI, has garnered over 8,000 stars on GitHub, serving more than 1 million searches.
The open-source project, called Scria AI, has garnered over 8,000 stars on GitHub, serving more than 1 million searches. 
["AI (Artificial Intelligence)", "Perplexity"]
["Go", "API", "Perplexity", "programming_languages:R", "AI", "programming_languages:Go", "Git", "Groq", "GitHub", "R", "AI (Artificial Intelligence)", "startup"]
["AI", "R", "Go", "Git", "GitHub", "API", "startup", "Groq", "programming_languages:R", "programming_languages:Go"]
Supreeth is an engineering graduate who is curious about the world of artificial intelligence and loves to write stories on how it is solving problems and shaping the future of humanity.