Who Founded Perplexity?

Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and has been CEO since then. Before that he was a research scientist at OpenAI, working on generative models and reinforcement learning. As CEO he has led the company through rounds that took its valuation from $520 million (January 2024) to $20 billion (September 2025). He also oversaw the launches of Comet and Computer. Aravind Srinivas was born in 1994.

Denis Yarats co-founded Perplexity AI and serves as its Chief Technology Officer. Drawing on his deep background in machine learning and reinforcement learning at FAIR, he engineered the underlying conversational search infrastructure that allows Perplexity to synthesize answers from live web data with high accuracy.

Yarats was born in 1987 and is a computer scientist.

Johnny Ho co-founded Perplexity AI as its Chief Strategy Officer. He brought extensive experience in scalable engineering and rapid product development from his time at Quora and Tower Research Capital, playing a vital role in optimizing Perplexity's fast, low-latency search ranking capabilities. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).

Andy Konwinski co-founded Perplexity AI, bringing unparalleled strategic experience in scaling massive cloud and AI infrastructure companies. Having already co-founded Databricks and Anyscale, his expertise was critical in helping Perplexity navigate the intensely capital- and compute-heavy landscape of generative AI.

Education: University of California, Berkeley.

Konwinski was born on October 15, 1983. He is also a co-founder of Databricks and an early contributor to Apache Spark, and he co-founded the venture firm Laude Ventures. (Exact birth year remains publicly undisclosed).