Arvind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, has become India’s youngest billionaire, according to the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025.
This marks his debut on the list, with an estimated net worth
of Rs 21,190 crore. Dubbed the “Chennai Boy,” Srinivas’s AI search engine is competing with Google Gemini and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Recently, his company made headlines by bidding approximately $34.5 billion (around ₹3 lakh crore) to acquire Google’s Chrome browser.
Born on June 7, 1994, in Chennai, Srinivas displayed an early interest in technology, mathematics, and science. A bright student, he excelled in school and received the Government of India’s National Talent Search (NTS) scholarship. After completing his schooling, he earned both B.Tech and M.Tech degrees in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras. He then moved to the United States to pursue a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where he researched machine learning and artificial intelligence. His research papers have been published in top AI conferences such as ICLR, AAAI, and NeurIPS.
Kickstarted His Career With OpenAI
Srinivas began his career at OpenAI in 2018, where he worked on reinforcement learning projects. After a brief hiatus, he returned to OpenAI as a research scientist in 2021, specialising in large-scale learning models at DeepMind, and further honing his expertise in AI research. He also worked at Google on vision transformer models.
Perplexity AI Established In 2022
In 2022, Srinivas, along with Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, and Johnny Ho, founded Perplexity AI, an AI-powered search engine competing with traditional search engines. Under his leadership, the company achieved rapid success, attracting major investors like Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Nat Friedman.