Aravind Srinivas
Background
Aravind Srinivas earned his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras and completed his Ph.D. in computer science at UC Berkeley, where he focused on contrastive learning, reinforcement learning, and generative vision models.
Role at Perplexity AI, Inc.
Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Perplexity AI, Inc. Prior to founding Perplexity, Srinivas completed research internships at DeepMind and Google Brain, before joining OpenAI as a research scientist in 2021, where he worked on language and diffusion models. Recognizing that the transformative power of generative AI could be combined with real-time web retrieval to replace Google's twenty-year search monopoly, Srinivas left OpenAI to establish Perplexity in 2022. Under his leadership as CEO, Perplexity scaled into a $9.0 billion answer engine titan serving millions of daily active users, securing investments from Jeff Bezos, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, and emerging as the defining challenger to traditional web search.