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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas Proves What Tamil Nadu Could Achieve, If It Looked Beyond Dravidian Limits

By
Baskar
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Aravind Srinivas Proves What Tamil Nadu Could Achieve—If It Looked Beyond Dravidian Limits

Aravind Srinivas is the Co-founder, President and CEO of Perplexity, a $20B company  at the forefront of artificial intelligence. Founded in 2022 in San Francisco, Perplexity is recognized globally for products including:

  • Answer (Search) Engine
  • Perplexity Assistant
  • Comet AI Browser
  • Perplexity Pro (for deep research)
Perplexity’s Rise as a Top AI Startup
  • Global Rankings: Top 10 AI company, Top 7 in AI search market
  • Google Substitute: Competes as a next-gen search engine, delivering quick, clear, citation-based answers free of advertisements
  • Multi-Platform: Available via web, Android app, and browser extension
Recent Highlights

Aravind and Perplexity made headlines when his Company bid for Google Chrome while Google was facing antitrust scrutiny in US. He also debuted in the Hurun India rich list as India’s youngest billionaire.

Vision and Philosophy

Unlike some Dravidian Stock entrepreneurs who focus on entertainment and media, Aravind is committed to meaningful product creation:
He believes in products that democratize knowledge, promoting universal access to education and research.
Despises corporate hierarchy and avoids fostering addiction through his products.

  • Policy Engagement: Active presence in Delhi, engineering teams in Bangalore and Hyderabad
  • Startup Support: Planning the Perplexity Fund to back Indian ventures
  • Government Collaboration: Input to central/state policy, advocacy for sovereign AI investment and GPU clusters
  • Societal Impact: Discussed with PM Modi the importance of AI in local languages, cross-referencing ancient Indian knowledge, and focusing on curiosity-driven usage rather than making people lazy.

Journey to the Top

Personal Background

Born 1994, Chennai, to Lakshminarayanan (Accountant) and Jayanthi (Central Govt employee)

Schooling: DAV Gopalapuram and DAV Public School, Velachery

Early Achievements: National Mathematics Olympiad, KVPY scholar

“Every time we would go on a bus and pass by the IIT Madras campus, my mom would point to the campus and say, ‘This is where you’re going to study.’”

His father had instilled on him the culture of being scholarly with pursuits for educational excellence and research rather than just generating wealth

JEE/AIEEE Success: AIR 980 (JEE), fourth rank TN (AIEEE). Trained by Prof. KK Anand’s SMART academy between 2008-2011. His dedication and focus for IIT JEE was spotted in his school days with Aravind focusing on JEE preparation even during regular classes.

In the JEE results, he was ranked behind his classmate R Krishnan and his other buddy group. He couldn’t secure his preferred course of Computer Science and could only get Electrical Engineering in his B. Tech course at IIT Madras. He also fell marginally short of the required CGPA by 0.01 to switch his majors to Computer Science post the first semester.

This drove him to a phase of focused vengeance leading him to study Python, Machine learning on his own watching online videos of Andrew Ng’s Stanford lectures on machine learning. This was even as he was doing his EE course at IITM. As a result, he was the class topper at IITM in Machine learning in his 3rd year.

His IIT professor B Ravindran was his guide and mentor teaching him Deep learning, Reinforcement learning even before it was the hot thing.

Campus Contributions

During his recent visit to IITM, he offered free access of Perplexity Pro to its faculty and students. This cutting-edge search engine is designed to provide a more robust and versatile search experience, empowering users to conduct more thorough investigations into topics.

Offered free access to Perplexity Pro for IITM faculty & students, driving research empowerment.

Academic and Professional Excellence

Research Papers: During his time at IIT Madras, Aravind published in top tier AI conferences like International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and NeurIPS. Aravind collaborated with his professors and had a total of 9 papers published.

Internship: Srinivas was rewarded for his efforts when he got an internship with Canadian computer scientist and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio who recommended Srinivas for PhD in Computer Science and could get admissions from UC Berkeley. There he researched research spanning computer vision, reinforcement learning, transformers, and generative models.

PhD: At the University of California, Berkeley, Srinivas met research scientist John Schulman who was working with Open AI and who invented Chat GPT. He noticed his work and invited him to do an internship at Open AI where he worked on language and diffusion text models.

Industry internship: Srinivas worked with Deep Mind and Google, between 2019 and 2021, after the internship with Open AI before returning to Sam Altman’s company in 2021. His stints included OpenAI, DeepMind in London, and Google, where he contributed to models such as HaloNet, ResNet-RS, and OpenAI’s celebrated DALL·E 2.

Entrepreneurship: A year later, Srinivas decided to quit and became the co-founder CEO of Perplexity AI in August 2022. Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI along with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. The startup’s conversational search engine aims to offer fast, accurate, and trustworthy answers, positioning itself as an alternative to traditional search platform

Since 2023, Srinivas has also been active as an angel investor, backing AI ventures like ElevenLabs (text-to-speech) and Suno (text-to-music). His investments underline his broader bet on generative AI innovation.

Family: His parents are in Chennai while he stays in Bay Area with his wife.

Inspirations and Mentors

Aravind had been inspired by Sundar Pichai and though Perplexity is billed as Google Search’s key competitor, they share a good connect. He had infact changed his food habit to Lacto-ovo vegetarian after hearing Sundar’s diet in one of his videos and got permission for this change, from his mother as well.

His mentor includes Satya Nadella and calls him a phenomenal CEO and Coach. He calls Satya as a learning machine and keep speaking atleast once a month.

Views on Silicon Valley:

Aravind Srinivas views Silicon Valley as one of the few truly meritocratic places in the world, especially for outsiders. Despite challenges like immigration rules and H-1B visa fee hikes, Silicon Valley remains welcoming to those who think differently and execute relentlessly. He emphasized the critical importance of trusted mentors who can vouch for, invest in, and guide newcomers, even if they might compete with them later.

Views on India:

He wants Indian founders to create world class products rather than just managing existing firms. He works hard and has an intense work ethic. “Indians are not just meant for managing and climbing up the ladder to being CEOs… I want India to show the world that we can build companies.” Srinivas articulated pride in Indian-origin CEOs but also stressed the need to shift the mindset from managing other people’s companies to building the next Google or $1 trillion company founded by Indians, drawing parallel with the Indian cricketers who are now global icons

Tamil Nadu’s Tech Legacy

Aravind joins the ranks of Tamil Nadu-bred tech icons:

  • Sundar Pichai (Google)
  • Sridhar Vembu (Zoho)
  • N Chandrasekaran (now Chairman – Tata Group

All four of them share common culture and tradition steeped in scholarly professions and working to spread knowledge and uplifting people’s lives.

Their lineage reflects deep cultural influence of Tamil Brahmins in fostering education and enterprise, a legacy that continues to inspire new generations.

Irrespective of the controversial political ideologies in the State of Tamil Nadu, its people would continue to be inspired by these icons and focus on benefits of education and pursuit of excellence.

Baskar is a finance professional having keen interest in current affairs and Indian culture.

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