In the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence, few names stand out as much as Aravind Srinivas, who is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI. Srinivas is only 31 years old, but he has already become a leader. By July 2025, his company will be worth an incredible $18 billion, and he is competing with tech giants like Google and OpenAI with an AI-powered search engine. His rise from a curious boy in Chennai, India, to a global tech leader shows how smart, strong, and determined he is to change the way people interact with information. This article goes into detail about Srinivas’s life, his education and career, the start and growth of Perplexity AI, and his big ideas for the future of AI-driven search.
Early Life and Schooling
Aravind Srinivas was born on June 7, 1994, in Chennai (formerly Madras), Tamil Nadu. He grew up in a Tamil family that valued education highly. His mother had a big impact on his goals. On their bus rides, she would often point to the gates of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and say, “You will study there one day.” This quiet encouragement turned into a shared dream that drove Srinivas’s academic goals from a young age. It was clear from a young age that he was smart and interested in learning. He won the National Talent Search Scholarship and a merit certificate in the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad.
Srinivas started his academic career at IIT Madras, where he earned two degrees (B.Tech and M.Tech) in electrical engineering. He graduated in 2017. But his journey wasn’t easy. He wanted to study computer science at first, but he missed the chance to change his major by just 0.01 points in his overall GPA after his first semester. This setback made him depressed because he thought his peers who got computer science jobs were better than him. But this problem turned out to be a blessing in disguise. Srinivas got really into self-directed learning and found online lectures and competitive programming sites. He worked hard to learn Python, which would later be very useful in his AI career, especially since most of his IIT classmates didn’t know it yet.
Srinivas’s interest in AI and machine learning grew while he was at IIT Madras. He was an electrical engineering student, but he took advantage of the school’s forward-thinking teachers, like Professors Ravindran B. and Mitesh Khapra, who were among the few who taught AI and machine learning at the time. Srinivas did very well in a machine learning class offered by the computer science department. He was the best in the class and proved his critics wrong. His academic success led to nine published papers at well-known AI conferences like ICLR, AAAI, and NeurIPS, making him a rising star in the field.
A Global Journey from School to Work
Srinivas got his Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, after graduating from IIT Madras. He worked with famous AI researcher Pieter Abbeel. His doctoral thesis, “Representation Learning for Perception and Control,” was about deep learning, reinforcement learning, and robotics, which helped him become even more knowledgeable about AI. Srinivas worked as an intern at some of the best AI research groups in the world while he was at Berkeley. These included OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California. These experiences showed him the latest developments in machine learning and large language models (LLMs), which helped him shape his vision for the future of AI.
Srinivas’s journey took a big turn when he did an internship at Google DeepMind in London. He lived in small places and often spent the night at work, where he found In the Plex, a book about Google’s early years. Srinivas was inspired to start his own business after hearing the story of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students who built a tech giant. His time at OpenAI strengthened this goal even more because he saw how LLMs could change the world by giving human-like answers to hard questions. These events set the stage for what would become Perplexity AI.
Arvind Srinivas Net Worth
Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI, has an estimated net worth of ₹223.8 crore to ₹269.3 crore (roughly $27–32 million USD) as of 2025.How he built it:
- He co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022, which is now valued at $14–18 billion.
- The company generates around $50 million in annual revenue.
- He holds equity in Perplexity and has made strategic investments in companies like Chennai Meenakshi Multispeciality Hospital Ltd and eMudhra Ltd.
- His career includes stints at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind, plus a PhD in AI from UC Berkeley.
Srinivas recently made headlines for proposing a $34.5 billion all-cash bid to acquire Google Chrome, a move that stunned the tech world and showcased his bold vision for AI-powered search.
Starting Perplexity AI: A Different Way to Search
Srinivas helped start Perplexity AI in August 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, a group of engineers who are experts in AI, machine learning, and back-end systems. The company’s goal was to make an AI-powered “answer engine” that gives direct, conversational answers with verifiable citations. This would challenge Google’s traditional link-based search model. Perplexity AI was named after a machine learning metric that measures how accurately a model predicts something. Its goal was to make it easier to find reliable information online.
Perplexity’s platform uses large language models like OpenAI’s GPT-3.5-turbo, GPT-4-turbo, Meta’s Llama, Anthropic’s Claude, and its own custom models, Sonar and R1 1776, to give short, sourced answers instead of a list of links like other search engines do. This method works well for people who want quick, accurate information without having to wade through websites full of ads. Perplexity’s main search engine came out in December 2022, followed by a Google Chrome extension and apps for iOS and Android. It quickly became popular with Silicon Valley’s elite, consultants, analysts, and journalists.
Perplexity AI has grown a lot under Srinivas’s direction. The platform said that by February 2023, two million different people had visited it. By May 2025, it was handling 780 million queries a month and had more than 30 million active users. The company’s value went up from $1 billion in April 2024 to $18 billion by July 2025. This was thanks to $1 billion in funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Nat Friedman, and SoftBank. Strategic partnerships, like the one with Bharti Airtel to give 360 million Indian users free access to Perplexity Pro, helped it reach even more people around the world.
Innovations and Problems: Changing the Way We Search
Confusion The conversational answer engine is AI’s main product. Other innovations include the Comet browser, which is an AI-powered tool that can work as a “AI agent” and do things like recruiting, scheduling, and personalizing emails on its own. Srinivas sees Comet becoming a “cognitive operating system” that makes work easier for knowledge workers. This could change the roles of recruiters and executive assistants, for example. In August 2025, Perplexity made a bold offer of $34.5 billion to buy Google Chrome. The company wanted to use Chrome’s three billion users to improve its AI-powered search capabilities. This offer, made while Google was fighting antitrust cases, shows how determined Srinivas is to go up against big tech companies directly.
But there has been some controversy around Perplexity’s quick rise. Media companies like the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times have looked into the company because they say it has violated copyright and scraped content without permission. Wired and web developer Robb Knight looked into Perplexity’s web crawlers and found that they ignored robots.txt protocols. Cloudflare’s CEO then criticized the company, saying its practices were like those of “North Korean hackers.” Srinivas has defended Perplexity’s actions by pointing out that it uses third-party crawlers and has started a program for publishers to share ad revenue with content creators. Srinivas is still focused on being open and coming up with new ideas, and he is using feedback to make Perplexity’s products better.
What I See for the Future: AI and Its Effects on the World
Srinivas’s goal is more than just beating Google. He thinks of Perplexity as a way to make knowledge available to everyone, especially students and communities that don’t get enough of it. He said in February 2025 that he would give away Perplexity Pro for free to students in India, hoping to get a million sign-ups by the middle of March. He also said he would work to improve AI in India by giving $1 million and five hours a week to a team working on open-source AI models that can compete with the best in the world. This was inspired by DeepSeek’s cost-effective innovations.
Srinivas’s bold predictions about how AI will affect the job market have caused a lot of discussion. He thinks that AI tools like Comet could make jobs like recruiters unnecessary in six months because they can automate tasks like finding candidates and sending personalized emails. Some people see this as a threat to jobs, but Srinivas says it means a more productive future and tells professionals to get used to AI-driven workflows. His outspoken personality, which comes through in viral interviews and online conversations with people like Elon Musk, has solidified his reputation as a thought leader who isn’t afraid to question the status quo.
Personal Drive and Legacy
Srinivas’s life is a rare mix of family history, technical skill, and business savvy. His mother’s dream of seeing him at IIT Madras turned into a global mission to change how we learn. Srinivas wants Perplexity to stay independent even though Apple and Meta are interested in buying it. He is looking at a possible IPO after 2028. His net worth is thought to be $1 billion, which is a lot because he owns a lot of Perplexity AI, which was worth $14 billion in June 2025. He also has investments in companies like Chennai Meenakshi Multispeciality Hospital and eMudhra Ltd.
Aravind Srinivas is a great example of the new generation of tech founders. He went from sleeping in DeepMind’s London office to running a company that handles millions of queries every day. Not only do aspiring entrepreneurs relate to his story, but so do people who believe in the power of hard work and new ideas. As Perplexity AI keeps pushing the limits of AI-driven search, Srinivas’s idea of a “cognitive operating system” promises to change the way we use information, making him a pioneer in the AI revolution.
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