Aravind Srinivas

Srinivas earned a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley and worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google before founding Perplexity in 2022. He set out to reinvent search around large language models, returning synthesized answers with inline citations rather than ranked links.

Under his leadership Perplexity routes across its own and third-party models, layers real-time retrieval on top, and has expanded into the Comet agentic browser and the Sonar developer API. Its citation-first format targets trust and answer quality as differentiators against incumbent search.

Backed by prominent investors at a valuation in the tens of billions, Srinivas has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google's AI Overviews and OpenAI's ChatGPT search, and as a heavy consumer of model APIs that exemplifies application-layer economics built on frontier models.