Aravind Srinivas is an Indian-American AI researcher and entrepreneur, the co-founder and chief executive of Perplexity AI, an "answer engine" that pairs large language models with real-time web search and cited sources.
Srinivas earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, working in Reinforcement learning and representation learning under advisor Pieter Abbeel. Before founding Perplexity, he held research positions at OpenAI and interned at DeepMind, giving him direct exposure to the pretraining and scaling work that would later inform Perplexity's product.
Founding Perplexity AI
Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. The product combined Retrieval-augmented generation techniques with a conversational interface, returning direct answers to search queries alongside inline citations to source pages, positioning it as an alternative to traditional keyword-based search engines and a direct competitor to ChatGPT's and Gemini's own search features. Perplexity grew quickly on the strength of this citation-first approach, which addressed some of the Hallucination (AI) concerns associated with using chatbots as a factual information source, and the company raised funding at rapidly increasing valuations through 2024 and 2025.
Publisher tensions and expansion
Perplexity's practice of summarizing and answering questions using content scraped or crawled from news and reference sites drew objections from publishers. The New York Times sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter in 2024, and News Corp filed a lawsuit against the company alleging copyright infringement, part of a broader pattern of AI and copyright disputes between AI companies and publishers. Srinivas has responded by signing revenue-sharing partnerships with a number of publishers and pitching Perplexity's model as more attributive to sources than typical AI chat products.
Under Srinivas, Perplexity expanded beyond its original search product into shopping and finance features, an enterprise offering, and in 2025 launched Comet, its own AI-integrated web browser, extending the company's ambitions from a search alternative toward a broader AI-native interface to the web.
Public profile
Srinivas has been an outspoken commentator on the pace of AI progress and Perplexity's ambition to challenge Google's dominance of search, frequently discussing the technical tradeoffs of retrieval-augmented systems versus larger context windows in public interviews and on social media.