Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas is an Indian computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and CEO ofPerplexity 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 atOpenAI,GoogleResearch, andDeepMind, 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 severalAI 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.
