Aravind Srinivas became India’s youngest billionaire in the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025 at age 31, with a net worth of Rs 21,190 crore. Srinivas, the founder and CEO of the AI startup Perplexity, has become well known in the tech community, especially in generative AI.
Srinivas, born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, on June 7, 1994, had an early passion for science. While studying at IIT Madras, Srinivas taught courses on reinforcement learning and advanced reinforcement learning. He later pursued a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and completed his studies in 2021. According to his LinkedIn profile, he had research interests in contrastive learning for computer vision, reinforcement learning, transformer-based models for image generation, image recognition, and video generation, and taught Deep Unsupervised Learning during the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2021.
Career Background
Srinivas accumulated industry experience at several leading technologist companies. He worked on reinforcement learning with OpenAI before moving to DeepMind in London, where he worked on contrastive learning. Following this, he worked at Google on vision models HaloNet and ResNet-RS and returned to OpenAI as a research scientist, where he worked on DALL-E 2, the text-to-image generation model.
Entrepreneurial Work
In August 2022, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski, which is an AI-powered chat-based search engine that quickly finds accurate and trustworthy answers to user questions using models like GPT-3.
Since January 2023, Srinivas has also been an angel investor in promising start-ups in AI technology, including ElevenLabs, which is a text-to-speech platform, and Suno, which develops text-to-music tools such as their web-based system.
Expanding in India
With India having developed the largest user base for Perplexity’s product globally, Srinivas identified India as a key pillar of his company’s growth strategy. With this momentum, he is also interested in initiatives outside of product development, including developing a Perplexity fund for strategic investments. According to an ET report, he is exploring an engineering team in India, likely to be based in Bengaluru or Hyderabad, but also open to collaborations in travel, shopping, education, and healthcare.
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