Perplexity AI, Inc.
Leadership History
2 leaders · 2022 to present
Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity, in the role since 2022.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aravind Srinivas | Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer | 2022 | Present | 4 |
| Denis Yarats | Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer | 2022 | Present | 4 |
Perplexity AI is a private San Francisco company best known for its answer engine, which gives cited written answers instead of a page of links. Since 2025 it has expanded into an AI browser (Comet) and an autonomous agent (Computer), and it serves consumers, enterprises and developers through the Sonar API. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California. Perplexity AI was founded in August 2022 in San Francisco, California, by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski to reinvent internet search into an interactive conversational answer engine with verified inline source citations.
Perplexity makes money mainly from subscriptions. The free tier is limited. Pro ($20 a month) and Max (a higher tier that includes the Comet browser's advanced features) add more queries and access to frontier models. Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max are sold per seat to companies and add security controls and search over internal files. Developers pay by usage for the Sonar API. Since February 2026 the Computer agent has added usage-based charges on top of subscriptions. Distribution deals with telecom carriers, device makers such as HP, and payment partners bring in users through bundled plans. Perplexity has also tested ads and run revenue-sharing programs for publishers.
Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer
2022 – Present
4 years (current)
Kept the product model-agnostic, moved into browsers and agents, and pursued distribution deals with carriers and PC makers such as HP. He has also signaled a possible IPO within a few years.
Has led Perplexity since founding, through its funding rounds and the launches of Comet and Computer.
Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer
2022 – Present
4 years (current)
Yarats spearheaded the development of Perplexity's proprietary search index and its hybrid LLM orchestration system, ensuring latency remained low while accuracy and citation quality remained high.
As CTO, he scaled the engineering team and built a platform capable of handling millions of complex queries daily, establishing Perplexity as a premier alternative to traditional search engines.
Perplexity faces several active lawsuits. Dow Jones and the New York Post, The New York Times, Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Reddit and other publishers accuse it of copying or scraping content without permission. Amazon sued in November 2025 over the Comet shopping agent; a March 2026 preliminary injunction was vacated by the Ninth Circuit on August 4, 2026, though other claims remain open. Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, ChatGPT search and Microsoft Copilot compete for the same queries. Running frontier models on every query keeps compute costs high.
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Perplexity AI. An Indian-born AI researcher and entrepreneur, Srinivas completed his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical engineering at IIT Madras, earned a Ph.D. in computer science from UC Berkeley, and conducted advanced AI research at OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and UC Berkeley.
At OpenAI and DeepMind, Aravind Srinivas worked on foundational transformer models, diffusion models for image generation, contrastive representation learning, and reinforcement learning, co-authoring pioneering academic papers alongside leading AI figures like Pieter Abbeel.
In mid-2022, observing how transformers could synthesize knowledge, Srinivas realized that traditional keyword search engines had become bloated with ads, SEO spam, and link farms. He conceived Perplexity to create a clean, conversational answer engine that delivers direct truth with verified sources.
Aravind Srinivas champions execution speed, shipping new product features weekly, maintaining direct engagement with power users on social media (X/Twitter), and strictly removing operational friction to out-innovate tech conglomerates.
The co-founding executive team includes Denis Yarats (Chief Technology Officer, former AI researcher at Meta AI and NYU), Johnny Ho (Chief Strategy Officer, former Quant at Tower Research and competitive programming champion), and Andy Konwinski (Co-founder of Databricks and founding board member).
Investors include IVP, NEA, Accel, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Nvidia and Jeff Bezos. Bezos and Nvidia joined in the January 2024 round.
Aravind Srinivas argues that traditional search engines are fundamentally misaligned because their business model depends on users clicking multiple links and viewing ad banners. In contrast, answer engines deliver direct utility by providing the synthesized answer immediately.
Aravind Srinivas envisions Perplexity as the default global knowledge interface, a ubiquitous intellectual copilot empowering scientists, students, corporate executives, and everyday citizens to curiosity-driven learning and instant problem solving.
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