In early 2025, Perplexity entered India through a major partnership with Bharti Airtel, giving millions of users access to Perplexity Pro. What looked like a routine telecom-AI deal signaled a deeper shift: a two-year-old startup was now challenging Google’s dominance in online search at scale. Leading that charge was Aravind Srinivas, a Chennai-born engineer who studied at IIT Madras and narrowly missed transferring into computer science.
Srinivas’s journey is anything but linear. Growing up in a family that valued academic achievement, he faced the intense pressure of IIT entrance exams. When he couldn’t switch into computer science, he taught himself Python and enrolled in machine learning courses outside his department. He contributed to research at conferences like NeurIPS and ICLR while still an undergraduate, gaining early exposure to deep learning.
He earned a PhD in computer science from UC Berkeley, interning at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain between 2019 and 2021. Those experiences revealed skill gaps he worked aggressively to close, rather than retreating from the field. In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity with Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho, positioning it as an answer engine that uses large language models to generate conversational responses with live source citations.
Perplexity grew rapidly, attracting millions of users for research, coding, and everyday queries. The Airtel partnership underscored its strategy to expand beyond desktop search into mobile-first markets. But the company also faced sharp criticism: Forbes and WIRED accused it of plagiarizing paywalled content, and publishers raised legal concerns about scraping practices. Srinivas acknowledged early shortcomings in attribution and defended AI-powered search as an inevitable evolution.
Today, Perplexity sits at the center of the AI search race—hailed as a promising challenger yet emblematic of the unresolved tensions around copyright and fair use. Srinivas’s story illustrates how combining research, engineering, and product instinct, even without a traditional path, can reshape an industry.
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