A lot of the people who find Investi already have a Perplexity tab open. They ask why a stock moved, they get a cited answer in a few seconds, and then they ask us the obvious question: if I already have that, why do I need this?
Perplexity Finance is a real product. You go to perplexity.ai/finance and you get quotes, a heatmap, a screener you can talk to, live filings, and an Earnings Hub that can transcribe a call while it is still happening. Ask why a name dropped 6% this morning and it will go look for the downgrade, the filing, and the headline, and show you where each one came from.
We are not going to tell you to close it. Both products can pull live numbers and read a print. The difference is what happens to the work after.
A research desk answers. A workspace is where the coverage lives.
What Perplexity Finance is
Perplexity started as an answer engine. Finance was always one of the things people asked it, so they built a dedicated hub around that habit. The product that exists today is a research desk you speak to in English: market data, transcripts, and web sources, folded into one cited reply instead of a page of links.
The natural use of it is the question you have right now. Why did this move. What did management say on the call. Give me a first pass on a company I have never looked at. Screen for mid-caps with this growth and that valuation. If you have a brokerage in the US or Canada, you can connect it through Plaid and ask about the holdings themselves.
They also shipped scheduled research. Tasks (now Scheduled Tasks inside Computer) will run a recurring query on a cadence you set and send you the result. That is real. A daily briefing on a watchlist is a useful thing.
What those runs do not have is a home for the work. Most scheduled tasks start a fresh agent with no prior conversation. You get a briefing. You do not get last quarter's thesis opened next to it.
Research deskCited answerStill a threadWorkspaceAnswer in the treeCompany still thereSame question, two different places for the workThe difference is the workspace
This is the part people mean when they ask us the question.
Perplexity is built around the thread. You ask, it answers, the answer lives in that thread. You can go back to it. You can drop it in a Space. Investi is built around a workspace: a tree of folders, companies, and writing you can move, rename, and archive, the way a developer organizes a project. One watchlist or fifty. Semiconductors in one folder, power in another, a watching pile for names you have not decided on yet. Drag a company. Put a thesis under it.
A watchlist of tickers is not the same as a company with a thesis under it.
SemiconductorsNVDAInvestment thesisAMDEarnings notesPowerVSTCEGWatchingTSLAA workspace, organized like a projectNotes are part of that, and they matter. They are not the whole thing. The workspace is the thing. The financials, the earnings, the holders, and your own writing sit with the company they are about. The analyst can see the tree. The portfolio, if you connect it, sits in the same place. The work has a shape you chose, and that shape is still there in October.
Why did NVDA drop today?Export controls hit the tape this morning, and two notes cut the data-center growth number. Here are the filings and the headlines.Find this again in your thread history.A threadSemiconductorsNVDAInvestment thesisQ2 checkStill here tomorrow. The analyst can open it.A workspaceWe have written before that a thesis is the argument you would defend to a skeptical version of yourself. Most investors keep that in their head, which is exactly where it degrades. Memory edits itself to match the price. A thread can hold a conversation. A Google Doc you never reopen holds it only in theory. A workspace holds it next to the name, next to the numbers, in a folder you can actually find.
The scarce thing is not another place to ask a question. It is a place the work can accumulate.
What that changes
Ask the analyst about a company in the tree and it has somewhere to stand. It can read what you already wrote, pull live data, and answer against that, with the reasoning and the fetches visible so you can catch it being wrong. When it wants to update a thesis, it drafts a diff. Nothing is written until you approve it.
That is also why a schedule means something different here. Perplexity can fire a Task. We can fire a monitor. Both show up without you remembering. A Task starts clean and brings back a briefing. A monitor can open the folder you pointed it at, read the thesis, and leave you a conversation you can continue. Same instinct. Different object.
A TaskStarts from zeroA briefingA monitorReads your thesisA chat you can continueBoth can run on a schedule. They start from different places.The rest of the studio is the same idea. Skills so the method is yours, installed on purpose, never a default. Your own data if the diet we shipped is not the diet you run. A brokerage connection that is read only on purpose, so the analyst can see the weights without anyone getting a trade button.
A research deskThe question you have right nowA workspaceThe coverage that has to lastWhat each one is forNone of this requires you to pick a winner. Perplexity is built around the question. Investi is built around the record. Those are different objects.
We build the harness. The opinions are yours.
Keep both open
Use whichever desk you want for the first pass. Click the citations, on theirs or on ours. A precise-sounding number on a thin name is still a number you should open the filing for. AI can be wrong. We say that about our own analyst too.
You can also plug Perplexity into Investi. They ship an MCP. Add it on the MCPs tab (you will need an API key), and the next time a question needs the open web the analyst can reach for it without leaving the folder you are in.
PerplexityMCPYour folderTheir search, your treeUse Investi when the name is one you are actually following. When you want the company in a folder, the thesis under it, and the next question asked against that, not against a blank thread. When next quarter you will want to know whether the two or three things you said you were betting on are still true.
We are in beta, and we would rather say that plainly than pretend the workspace is finished. The honest test is the one we give everyone who signs in: pick a company you already know well, ask something you would normally spend an evening on, and judge the answer against what you know. Then look at whether the work is still there tomorrow, in a place you can move.
If you want the longer version of what a thesis actually is, we wrote that here. If you want the design underneath the workspace, start with Anatomy of a harness.
A research desk is for the question. A workspace is for the work that has to last.