creators

Aravind Srinivas — Perplexity co-founder and CEO

Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and runs it as CEO. A Berkeley PhD under Pieter Abbeel, he did research at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind.

Aravind Srinivas is from Chennai, India. He took a bachelor's and a master's in electrical engineering at IIT Madras, then a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley, finished in 2021 under Pieter Abbeel in the Berkeley AI Research lab. He interned at OpenAI in his first Berkeley year, and his own speaker biography lists research-scientist work at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind; Berkeley says he spent about a year at OpenAI after the doctorate. He is a co-author of the 2021 paper 'Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling'. In August 2022 he co-founded Perplexity with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, and has been its CEO since. Perplexity's answer engine, launched in December 2022, pairs language models with live web retrieval and returns cited answers instead of a list of links. The company added a browser extension and mobile apps, then Comet, an agentic browser released for Windows and macOS on 9 July 2025, for Android that November and for iOS in March 2026. In February 2026 it launched Computer, an agent that splits a goal into tasks and runs them across several models. In the same month Perplexity ended advertising altogether, after piloting sponsored answers in 2024 and winding the programme down in late 2025, and put its business behind subscriptions: the argument its executives made was that sponsored text inside an answer would cost the product the trust it runs on.

Specialization

AI search, answer engines, AI browsers, reinforcement learning

Country

United States