Denis Yarats, the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Perplexity AI, is one of the most well-known names in the fast-changing world of artificial intelligence. Yarats has a strong background in machine learning and a desire to change the way we find information. He has been a key player in creating an AI-powered search engine that challenges the way traditional search works. Perplexity AI was founded in 2022 and has quickly become well-known. As of July 2025, it is worth $18 billion, and Yarats’ technical skills and creative thinking have been key to this success. This article looks at his journey, what he did, and how Perplexity AI will change the future of search.
Early Life and the Basics of School
Denis Yarats’ path into the world of AI started with a strong academic background. He went to New York University, where he learned more about computer science and became very interested in artificial intelligence, especially in areas like reinforcement learning, deep learning, natural language processing (NLP), and robotics. His schoolwork was on cutting-edge topics like semi-supervised hierarchical reinforcement learning with natural language, which laid the groundwork for his future work in AI-driven technologies.
Yarats has made a lot of important contributions to academia, and his research has been cited over 9,115 times, showing how influential he is in the AI community. His work has been praised by other researchers, including Yann LeCun, a well-known researcher who later became an angel investor in Perplexity AI after seeing an early demo that impressed him.
An AI Innovation Career
Yarats had a great career in the tech industry before co-founding Perplexity AI. He worked at some of the most important AI and machine learning companies. He worked as a Software Development Engineer II at Microsoft from 2011 to 2013, where he helped make the Bing search engine. This early experience with search technology would later help him with his work at Perplexity.
From 2013 to 2016, Yarats worked at Quora as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer. There, he was in charge of technical projects for the machine learning team. His time at Quora, a site where people ask and answer questions and share information, probably helped him come up with the idea for a search engine that is easy to use and lets people talk to each other. Yarats worked as an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (now Meta AI) from 2016 to 2022. There, he solved difficult problems in AI, which made him even more of an expert in the field.
Starting Perplexity AI
Yarats started Perplexity AI in August 2022 with Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. Their goal was to change the way people get information. On December 7, 2022, the company released its main AI-powered search engine. It has a conversational interface that gives short, correct answers with links to web-based sources. Perplexity is different from traditional search engines like Google, which often use ad-driven models and give you lists of links. Instead, it focuses on giving you direct, reliable answers as quickly, accurately, and openly as possible.
There were problems when Perplexity first started. At first, the team looked into a Text-to-SQL tool for structured data queries. However, when ChatGPT became popular in late 2022, they decided to change their strategy and make a general AI-powered search engine. This change took advantage of the growing public interest in AI and let Perplexity answer more complicated and general user questions. During this time of change, Yarats’ technical leadership was very important because he led the development of Perplexity’s core technology, which combines proprietary models like Sonar and R1 1776 with large language models (LLMs) like GPT-4, Claude, and Mistral.
Perplexity AI: A New Way to Search
With Yarats’ help, Perplexity AI has stood out in a crowded AI field. Users have liked that the platform can give answers that are aware of the context and backed up by citations. By early 2024, there were over 10 million monthly active users, and in May 2025 alone, it processed 780 million queries.
Yarats has stressed how important it is for Perplexity’s answers to be honest and relevant. He does this because he comes from an academic background where citing sources is common. He said in an interview, “We quickly realized that this is going to be a very important part of this LLM world because there’s a lot of false information and it’s hard to trust what you read.” Perplexity is different from other AI-driven platforms because it puts a lot of emphasis on being open and honest with users.
Yarats is dedicated to pushing the limits of AI, as shown by Perplexity’s new features like real-time stock quotes, financial analysis tools, and the Perplexity Assistant, which came out in January 2025. The company’s agentic web browser, Comet, and its ability to work with many LLMs are more examples of how good they are at technology. These improvements make it easier and more accurate than ever for people to do things like research and write emails.
Culture and Leadership at Perplexity
Yarats has been a key figure in shaping Perplexity’s engineering culture as CTO, focusing on simplicity, speed, and design that puts the user first. He has also pushed for a unique hiring process that puts trial periods ahead of traditional interviews. This makes sure that the best technical talent is hired, people who can quickly iterate and come up with new ideas. One of the main reasons Perplexity has been able to quickly build and scale its technology is because he can hire skilled engineers, like co-founder Johnny Ho, who is a world-class competitive programmer.
Yarats’ leadership goes beyond just technical development. He has been an angel investor in companies like Cognition Labs and Supermaven since January 2024, and he backs the next generation of AI innovation. His goal for Perplexity isn’t just to compete with Google; he wants to change how people search by making it a smooth, conversational experience that gives them information.
Problems and Disagreements
Even though Perplexity AI has been successful, it has had to deal with legal problems because it is accused of copyright violations and scraping content without permission. Major news organizations like The New York Times and the BBC have said that the company used their content without permission. Yarats and his team have dealt with these problems while still coming up with new ideas. For example, they started a publishers’ program in July 2024 to share ad revenue with content partners.
What Will Happen to Perplexity and Yarats’ Legacy?
Perplexity AI is worth $18 billion as of July 2025, thanks to big-name investors like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Yann LeCun. The company’s fast growth and creative approach make it a strong competitor in the AI-powered search space. Yarats’ technical know-how and ability to see the big picture have been key to this success. He wants to make Perplexity even better at handling complicated questions and giving users personalized, correct answers.
Yarats has talked about how excited he is about AI’s potential to change how people find information in interviews. He has stressed how Perplexity can help users save time and get reliable answers. His path from being a researcher at Meta to co-founding a billion-dollar startup shows his dedication to making knowledge available to everyone and his constant search for new ideas.
In conclusion, Denis Yarats is not just a technologist; he is a visionary who is changing the way we use information. With Perplexity AI, he has questioned traditional search methods and put accuracy, openness, and user experience first. Yarats’ work will have a lasting effect on the AI industry as the company continues to grow and come up with new ideas. He will be remembered as a pioneer in the future of search.
