Aravind Srinivas, the 31-year-old Chennai-born AI entrepreneur, has entered the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025. He is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI and is the country’s youngest billionaire. The Chennai-born entrepreneur is now a prominent name in the tech world. His contribution to generative AI has made India proud. He was listed on the Hurun India Rich List 2025 with an estimated net worth of Rs 21,190 crore.
Who Is Aravind Srinivas?
Aravind Srinivas was born on June 7, 1994, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu. Being very keen about science, he later developed an early interest in science. He earned dual degrees in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, where he also taught advanced courses on reinforcement learning. He later pursued a PhD in Computer Science at UC Berkeley, with research spanning reinforcement learning, image generation, and transformer-based vision models. He worked on research in several areas, including contrastive learning for computer vision, reinforcement learning, and transformer-based models for generating images. He also focused on image recognition and video generation.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he taught a course on Deep Unsupervised Learning during the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2021.
Career – Aravind Srinivas
In his early career, Aravind Srinivas worked with some of the world’s leading AI labs: OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. He contributed to projects such as DALL-E 2, HaloNet, and ResNet-RS. This experience provided him with the foundation to start his own company.
Perplexity AI and Aravind Srinivas
In August 2022, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. Their goal was simple: to create a chat-based search engine that gives quick, accurate, and reliable answers. Srinivas described it as “the fastest way to get answers to any question.”
Perplexity quickly gained traction. Perplexity AI received investment from top investors, including Jeff Bezos, and even attracted buyout offers from Apple and Meta. However, Srinivas has stated that the company will remain independent, with plans to go public after 2028.
