Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas is an Indian computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI. He has built his career around artificial intelligence, with experience across leading research organisations and startups.
 

He began his professional journey with research roles at OpenAI, Google Research, and DeepMind, where he contributed to areas such as contrastive learning, transformers for vision, diffusion generative models, and reinforcement learning. His work included contributions to projects like Bottleneck Transformers, HaloNet, Copy-Paste Augmentation, CPCv2, and policy gradient algorithms. During this period, he was involved in research on language models, image recognition, video generation, and reinforcement learning systems.
 

In founding Perplexity AI, Srinivas and his co-founders, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, introduced an “answer engine” that searches the web and provides concise, cited responses. This positioned Perplexity as a direct alternative to traditional link-based search engines. Under his leadership, the company has secured significant funding from investors such as Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Nat Friedman, and Elad Gil. In July 2025, the company reached an $18 billion valuation and reported annual recurring revenue of around $100 million.
 

The company has established partnerships with publishers, including Time, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and Fortune, while also facing legal disputes with organisations such as Dow Jones and News Corp over content use. Perplexity has further expanded through distribution deals with companies like Motorola and Airtel. A major milestone was the launch of Comet, an AI-native web browser that integrates Perplexity’s assistant to perform tasks such as bookings, research, and form-filling.

In addition to leading Perplexity, Srinivas has been active as an angel investor in several AI startups, including Cursor, Eleven Labs, Mistral, Cognition Labs, Pika Labs, Suno, and Udio. He has been recognised in TIME’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in AI.
 

Srinivas studied electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and later earned a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley.

Aravind Srinivas was born on 7 June 1994 in Chennai, India, into a Tamil family. He developed a strong interest in mathematics and science at an early age and was recognised as a Merit Awardee in the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad. He also received the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana scholarship and the National Talent Search Scholarship from the Government of India.
 

From 2012 to 2017, Srinivas studied at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, where he earned a dual degree in electrical engineering (B.Tech and M.Tech). During this period, he carried out research on reinforcement learning, working on dynamic action repeats for hierarchical reinforcement learning and transfer learning, with papers presented at major conferences such as AAAI and ICLR. He also taught courses on reinforcement learning and advanced reinforcement learning. In 2015, he was awarded the Viterbi India Fellowship from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum.
 

Between 2017 and 2021, he pursued a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, under the supervision of Pieter Abbeel. His doctoral thesis was titled Representation Learning for Perception and Control. His research covered contrastive learning for computer vision (CPCv2), reinforcement learning methods such as CURL and Decision Transformer, transformers for image generation (Flow++), image recognition (BoTNet), and video generation (VideoGPT). 

While at Berkeley, he also taught deep unsupervised learning courses. During this time, he completed several research internships: at OpenAI in 2018 he worked on policy gradient algorithms, at DeepMind in 2019 he worked on large-scale contrastive learning with CPCv2, and at Google Research in 2020 and 2021 he worked on vision models such as Bottleneck Transformers, HaloNet, Copy-Paste Augmentation, and ResNet-RS.
 

In 2021 he joined OpenAI as a research scientist, focusing on language models and diffusion generative models. This role helped shape his direction as he later moved into entrepreneurship. In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI in San Francisco with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company set out to build an “answer engine” to provide concise, cited responses to user queries as an alternative to link-based search engines.
 

From 2023 to 2024, Perplexity expanded under his leadership and raised significant venture funding from investors such as Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Nat Friedman, and Elad Gil. The company launched partnerships with publishers including Time, Der Spiegel, Le Monde, the Los Angeles Times, and Fortune through its Publishers’ Programme, although it also faced legal disputes with Dow Jones, News Corp, and the New York Post over copyright and trademark issues. 

In 2024, Srinivas spoke publicly about his difficulties in obtaining a United States green card, drawing attention when Elon Musk responded to one of his posts. In the same year, he was listed in TIME magazine’s “TIME100 Most Influential People in AI”.

In 2025, Perplexity continued to grow with distribution deals such as one with Motorola to pre-install Perplexity Pro on selected smartphones and another with Airtel in India to expand its reach. In July 2025, the company reached a valuation of 18 billion US dollars and reported annual recurring revenue of around 100 million US dollars. 

Perplexity also launched Comet, an AI-native web browser that allows its assistant to read web pages, open tabs, prepare research, book travel, and fill forms. Alongside his role as CEO of Perplexity, Srinivas has been an active angel investor, backing several AI startups, including Cursor, Eleven Labs, Mistral, Cognition Labs, Pika Labs, Suno, Udio, Cartesia, LiveKit, Antimetal, Ray, Silurian, and Fal AI.
 

As of 2025, Aravind Srinivas continues as the CEO of Perplexity AI, overseeing the company’s growth in AI-powered search and web browsing. He remains closely involved in developing partnerships with technology firms, mobile carriers, and publishers while guiding the product strategy of Perplexity. He is recognised internationally as an important figure in shaping the future of AI, search technology, and the delivery of trustworthy information.

Aravind Srinivas believes that technology should provide people with direct and trustworthy answers instead of forcing them to search through long lists of links. His vision is to build tools that make information more accessible, accurate, and useful in everyday life. He sees artificial intelligence as a way to reduce barriers to knowledge by creating systems that are simple to use and reliable in what they deliver. Through Perplexity AI, he aims to develop an “answer engine” and AI assistant that helps people learn, decide, and act with confidence in a world shaped by digital information.

Aravind Srinivas has received recognition for both his academic achievements and professional contributions in artificial intelligence. As a student, he was honoured with the Indian National Mathematics Olympiad Merit Award, the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana scholarship, and the National Talent Search Scholarship. He also received the Viterbi India Fellowship from the Indo-US Science and Technology Forum. In his professional career, he has been listed in TIME magazine’s “TIME100 Most Influential People in AI”. His work at Perplexity AI and his research contributions have made him a well-known figure in global discussions on artificial intelligence and search technologies.