Aravind Srinivas, a 31-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai, has entered the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025 as the country’s youngest billionaire. His estimated net worth stands at Rs 21,190 crore.
Born on June 7, 1994, in Chennai, he developed an early interest in science and technology. During his years at IIT Madras, he not only studied engineering but also taught courses on reinforcement learning and advanced reinforcement learning. He later moved to the United States and completed his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2021.
During his PhD at UC Berkeley, Srinivas worked on areas such as contrastive learning, reinforcement learning, transformer-based image models, video generation and image recognition.
He also taught Deep Unsupervised Learning in the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2021. After completing his academic work, he gained industry experience at leading global tech organisations.
He worked at OpenAI on reinforcement learning and later joined DeepMind in London to focus on contrastive learning. He then worked at Google, where he contributed to vision models such as HaloNet and ResNet-RS.
Building Perplexity AI
In August 2022, Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. The company created a chat-based search engine designed to give fast, accurate and trustworthy answers to user queries. Perplexity uses large language models and AI tools similar to GPT-3 to produce search responses.
Srinivas returned to OpenAI as a research scientist before launching Perplexity, and during that period he worked on DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generation model. Perplexity’s rapid growth has placed the startup among the leading companies in the generative AI space.
Investments and India-Focused Plans
Since January 2023, Srinivas has also been active as an angel investor. He has invested in AI startups such as ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech platform, and Suno, which builds text-to-music tools. Perplexity’s user base in India has now become its largest in the world. Seeing this growth, Srinivas has identified India as an important part of the company’s long-term strategy.
He is considering setting up an engineering team in Bengaluru or Hyderabad. He is also exploring partnerships in travel, shopping, healthcare and education, along with a dedicated Perplexity fund for strategic investments in India.
Swastika Sruti is a Senior Sub Editor at NewsX Digital with 5 years of experience shaping stories that matter. She loves tracking politics- national and global trends, and never misses a chance to dig deeper into policies and developments. Passionate about what’s happening around us, she brings sharp insight and clarity to every piece she works on. When not curating news, she’s busy exploring what’s next in the world of public interest. You can reach her at [swastika.newsx@gmail.com]
