TLDR: Aravind Srinivas, the 31-year-old co-founder and CEO of AI search engine Perplexity AI, has been recognized as India’s youngest billionaire on the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025, with a net worth of Rs 21,190 crore. His ascent is attributed to the rapid success of Perplexity AI, an innovative platform challenging traditional search engines with its AI-powered, conversational, and verifiable answers. Srinivas’s journey includes significant contributions at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind before launching his own venture.
Chennai-born entrepreneur Aravind Srinivas, at just 31 years old, has made a remarkable debut on the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025, securing his position as the country’s youngest billionaire. His estimated net worth stands at an impressive Rs 21,190 crore (approximately $2.5 billion USD), primarily driven by the phenomenal growth of his artificial intelligence (AI) startup, Perplexity AI.
Srinivas, born on June 7, 1994, co-founded Perplexity AI in August 2022 alongside Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company has rapidly emerged as a significant player in the tech landscape, offering an AI-powered, chat-based search engine designed to provide fast, accurate, and trustworthy answers to user queries, complete with verified citations. This innovative approach has positioned Perplexity AI as a bold alternative to traditional link-based search engines like Google.
Perplexity AI’s rapid adoption underscores its impact. By May 2025, the platform forged a strategic partnership with Bharti Airtel, granting 360 million Indian users free access to Perplexity Pro. This collaboration significantly boosted its reach, contributing to over 30 million active users and processing 780 million queries per month globally. By July 2025, Perplexity AI achieved a valuation of $18 billion, firmly establishing its prominence in the AI industry and elevating Srinivas to the ranks of global tech leaders.
Srinivas’s academic and professional background laid a strong foundation for his entrepreneurial success. He graduated from IIT Madras in 2017 with dual degrees in electrical engineering. He then pursued a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, completing it in 2021. His doctoral research focused on cutting-edge areas such as contrastive learning for computer vision, reinforcement learning, and transformer-based models for image and video generation. During his time at Berkeley, he also taught Deep Unsupervised Learning.
Before venturing into entrepreneurship, Srinivas honed his skills at some of the world’s leading AI research institutions. He worked at OpenAI as a research intern and later as a research scientist, notably contributing to the development of DALL-E 2, a groundbreaking text-to-image generation model. His experience also includes stints at DeepMind, where he focused on contrastive learning, and Google, where he worked on developing vision models like HaloNet and ResNet-RS. According to the Hurun report, Srinivas’s motivation stemmed from a desire to create a more transparent and verifiable AI-powered search experience, a vision that Perplexity AI embodies.
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Beyond his role at Perplexity AI, Srinivas has also been an active angel investor since January 2023, supporting promising AI startups such as ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech platform, and Suno, which specializes in text-to-music tools. His inclusion in the Hurun India Rich List 2025 highlights not only his personal wealth but also the burgeoning potential and rapid growth within India’s technology and AI sectors.
