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Aravind Srinivas

Co-founder and CEO, Perplexity

AI searchAnswer enginesLarge language modelsReinforcement learning

Education

Aravind Srinivas holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras[1][2]. He earned his PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley[1][2].

At Berkeley he was a doctoral student of Pieter Abbeel in the Robot Learning Lab[3]. He completed his thesis, Representation Learning for Perception and Control, in August 2021, and the lab lists his next role as research scientist at OpenAI[3].

Research on representation learning and transformers

In April 2020 Srinivas, Michael Laskin and Abbeel published CURL, a method that uses contrastive learning to extract high-level features from raw pixels and performs reinforcement learning on top of those features[4]. The paper reported performance gains of 1.9 times on the DeepMind Control Suite and 1.2 times on Atari games at the 100,000-step benchmarks, compared with earlier pixel-based methods[4]. The authors wrote that on the DeepMind Control Suite, CURL was the first image-based algorithm to nearly match the sample efficiency of methods that use state-based features[4].

In January 2021 he was first author of Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition, written with researchers including Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar[5]. He was also a co-author of Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling, published in June 2021[6].

Before co-founding Perplexity, Srinivas worked as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind[1][2]. TechCrunch reported that at OpenAI he researched language and generative AI models[7].

Founding Perplexity

Srinivas co-founded Perplexity with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, and the company has operated since August 2022[7]. TechCrunch described the founders as engineers with backgrounds in AI, distributed systems, search engines and databases[7]. Srinivas is the company's CEO[1][7].

Perplexity offers a chatbot-style search interface where users ask questions in natural language and get a summary with source citations, followed by the option to ask follow-up questions[7]. At the time Srinivas said that users could get instant answers to any question with full sources and citations[7]. In January 2024 Perplexity raised $73.6 million in a round led by IVP, with investors including Nvidia and Jeff Bezos[7]. TechCrunch reported that the round valued the company at $520 million[7]. At that time, subscribers to the $20-per-month Pro plan could switch between models from Google, Mistral, Anthropic and OpenAI[7].

In July 2025 Perplexity launched Comet, its first AI-powered web browser, with its AI search engine set as the default[8]. Comet includes Comet Assistant, an AI agent in the browser that can summarize emails and calendar events, manage tabs and navigate web pages for the user[8]. TechCrunch noted that Srinivas had promoted the launch heavily and saw the browser as a way to reach users without going through Google Chrome[8].

Plans for 2026 and beyond

In June 2026 Srinivas told CNBC that Perplexity was planning to go public in 2028, regardless of how the market received the listings of Anthropic and OpenAI[9]. He said the 2028 plan was independent of those two companies[9]. London Tech Week's 2026 speaker page describes Perplexity as an answer engine that provides more than 10 billion answers per year, and lists a session with Srinivas on 8 June 2026[2].

Known for

Sources

  1. Milken Institute Global Conference 2024: Aravind Srinivas speaker page — checked 6 Nov 2026
  2. London Tech Week 2026: Aravind Srinivas speaker page — checked 6 Nov 2026
  3. UC Berkeley Robot Learning Lab: People (alumni theses) — checked 6 Nov 2026
  4. arXiv: CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning, April 2020 — checked 6 Nov 2026
  5. arXiv: Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition, January 2021 — checked 6 Nov 2026
  6. arXiv: Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling, June 2021 — checked 6 Nov 2026
  7. TechCrunch: Perplexity AI, now valued at $520M, raises $73.6M, January 2024 — checked 6 Nov 2026
  8. TechCrunch: Perplexity launches Comet, an AI-powered web browser, July 2025 — checked 6 Nov 2026
  9. Zawya (Reuters): Perplexity plans 2028 IPO, CNBC reports, June 2026 — checked 6 Nov 2026
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