Aravind Srinivas: India's Youngest Billionaire With Rs 21,190 Crore Net Worth and How He Built Perplexity AI

Aravind Srinivas, a 31-year-old AI entrepreneur born in Chennai, has emerged as India's youngest billionaire according to the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025. The founder and CEO of Perplexity AI commands an impressive net worth of Rs 21,190 crore, establishing himself as a significant figure in the generative AI landscape.

Born on June 7, 1994, in Tamil Nadu, Srinivas exhibited an early passion for scientific pursuits. During his education at IIT Madras, he distinguished himself by teaching courses focused on reinforcement learning.

His academic journey continued at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his PhD in Computer Science in 2021. His doctoral research encompassed diverse areas including contrastive learning for computer vision, reinforcement learning, and transformer-based models for image generation, recognition, and video production. While at Berkeley, he also taught Deep Unsupervised Learning during the Spring terms of 2020 and 2021.

Srinivas built an impressive professional portfolio at leading technology companies. He worked on reinforcement learning at OpenAI before joining DeepMind in London to focus on contrastive learning. Following this, he contributed to Google's development of vision models including HaloNet and ResNet-RS. His return to OpenAI as a research scientist saw him working on DALL-E 2, an advanced text-to-image generation system.

In August 2022, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI alongside Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. Their innovative AI-powered chat-based search engine delivers swift, accurate and reliable answers to user queries, leveraging models such as GPT-3.

Since January 2023, Srinivas has expanded his influence as an angel investor in promising AI ventures, including ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech platform, and Suno, which specializes in text-to-music technology.

With India becoming Perplexity's largest user base globally, Srinivas has recognized the country's strategic importance to the company's expansion plans. This growing presence has prompted him to explore broader initiatives, including the establishment of a Perplexity investment fund. According to reporting in ET, he is considering building an engineering team in either Bengaluru or Hyderabad, while remaining open to partnerships across sectors including travel, shopping, education, and healthcare.