Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas (born 7 June 1994) is an Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI, an artificial intelligence company specializing in conversational search technologies.^[1][2]

Aravind Srinivas
Born	(1994-06-07) June 7, 1994 (age 30) Chennai, India
Citizenship	American
Education	IIT Madras (B.Tech, M.Tech), University of California, Berkley (Ph.D.)
Occupation	CEO of Perplexity AI
Known for	Co-Founding Perplexity AI

Early life and education

Srinivas was born in Chennai, India. He earned dual degrees (B.Tech and M.Tech) in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras.^[3] He later pursued a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley,^[4] focusing on areas such as reinforcement learning, contrastive learning, and generative models.

Career

During his academic career, Srinivas held research positions at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind, contributing to advancements in machine learning and artificial intelligence.^[5]

In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI alongside Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company developed an AI-powered "answer engine" designed to provide direct, cited responses to user queries, distinguishing itself from traditional search engines.^[6][7][8]

Under Srinivas's leadership, Perplexity AI has secured significant funding from investors including Jeff Bezos^[9], Elad Gil, Nat Friedman,^[10] and NVIDIA.^[11][12][13] The company has also announced partnerships aimed at expanding its AI applications into hardware, such as a collaboration with Deutsche Telekom to develop an AI-integrated smartphone.^[14][15]