He Faced Rejection Early, Spiraled Into Depression, Almost Walked Away From His Dreams — Yet He Rose To Become One Of Youngest Billionaires At 31, ...

It is not every day that a 31-year-old makes headlines for crafting the future of how humans find truth on the internet. And it is certainly not every day that this person happens to be a bespectacled

boy from Chennai who once questioned his own place in the academic world. Aravind Srinivas — co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI — is not just another Silicon Valley success story packaged for LinkedIn inspiration. His journey spans the corridors of IIT Madras where dreams felt temporary, the research labs of UC Berkeley where ambition mutated into purpose, and the entrenched boardrooms of global tech where billion-dollar valuations are less shocking than the pace of innovation. His life, career and fortune read like a blueprint of what India’s Gen-Z-plus-millennial tech talent might reshape in the world ahead. It is strange to imagine that a teenager, disheartened by the absence of the Computer Science branch on his degree sheet, could go on to build a search engine that challenges Google. Stranger still that this same individual now sits on an estimated net worth of around Rs 21,190 crore as per the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025 — making him the youngest name among the 358 billionaires it tracks. Beneath those numbers, however, lies a quieter truth: the future of search might not be a page of links anymore; it might be conversational, contextual and unbearably fast — exactly the way Perplexity operates today. This is where Srinivas stands, arms folded, eyes sharp, asking the world if it is ready for what is coming next.

The Chennai Years: The boy who took apart gadgets instead of playing with them

Born on 7 June 1994 in Chennai, Aravind did not grow up with grand plans of building a billion-dollar AI platform. He was, instead, the kind of child every Indian household knows — the one who opens gadgets, studies wires like sentences, and refuses to play unless it involves pushing a machine beyond what it was designed to do. Family members joke (half-affectionately, half-exasperatedly) that no electronic toy in the house survived longer than a month. His formal academic path is well-documented. A dual degree from IIT Madras, specialising in Electrical Engineering, followed by a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. But what matters more are the emotional footnotes: the sting of not making it into Computer Science at IIT, the depression that followed, the 0.01 CGPA shortfall that crushed his branch-change dream. That microscopic fraction — one-hundredth of a grade point — could have ended the story. Instead, it became the hinge on which destiny turned. Most would have sulked. Srinivas re-wired. If Computer Science wouldn’t come to him, he would design a way in through machine learning, deeply mathematical, intellectually unforgiving, but thrilling if mastered well. It was a decision that eventually escorted him into the rooms where artificial intelligence was no longer fiction but architecture.

The Graduate Who Walked Into The Heart of AI

Berkeley sharpened him. The University has, for decades, been an incubator for scientific renegades — Douglas Engelbart, Andy Grove, Eric Schmidt — and Srinivas fit right into that lineage of disruptive thinkers. His research spanned reinforcement learning, vision systems, and contrastive modelling — territories most people read about, but very few build within. What followed was a tour through the highest temples of AI research. OpenAI first — where reinforcement learning became his intellectual playground. Then DeepMind London, where contrastive learning began reshaping the field. A stint at Google, contributing to models like HaloNet and ResNet-RS. And then, full-circle, a return to OpenAI, this time as a research scientist contributing to DALL·E 2 — the text-to-image model that stunned the world into believing machines could imagine. Fact most people don’t know: DALL·E 2’s earliest outputs were not the hyper-realistic artworks the world later applauded. They were crude, blurry, sometimes amusing — the kind of early attempts that prove genius is a staircase, never an elevator.

The Startup That Wanted To Fix The Internet

In 2022, armed with experience most researchers dream of, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats, Andy Konwinski and Johnny Ho. The idea was deceptively simple: instead of bombarding users with ten blue links, could AI answer a question directly, with sources to prove it? It was part search engine, part research assistant, part knowledge butler — and at a time when AI was exploding, the concept detonated into relevance. Perplexity today serves over 230 million queries a month. It is backed by Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman and other elite Valley investors, and is increasingly being spoken of as Google’s first real challenger in two decades. India, interestingly, is among its fastest-growing markets, with Srinivas exploring engineering centres in Bengaluru and Hyderabad. Discussions of an India-focused Perplexity investment fund have also circulated — signalling that his ambition is not westward-only but cyclical, returning to the land that raised him.

Wealth, Wheels and Why He Doesn’t Behave Like A Billionaire

There is something refreshingly un-dramatic about his lifestyle. No tabloids, no flashy villa tours, no aerial yachts gliding across the Amalfi Coast. He divides his time between Silicon Valley and Chennai, drives a Tesla Model S Plaid — an obvious favourite for engineers who prefer torque over leather upholstery — and collects motorcycles, most notably a Royal Enfield Classic. The man has a Rs 21,190 crore fortune, yet carries himself like someone still debugging code at 3 AM. For context, the Hurun India Rich List 2025 features 358 billionaires with total wealth of Rs 167 lakh crore. Mukesh Ambani sits at the summit with Rs 9.55 lakh crore, Gautam Adani follows with Rs 8.15 lakh crore. Among women, Roshni Nadar Malhotra leads. Shah Rukh Khan, meanwhile, has officially crossed into the billionaire club with Rs 12,490 crore — perhaps the only billionaire who can sell tickets, colas and dreams in equal measure. What stands out, however, is that two-thirds of this list is self-made. No inheritance, no dynasty, no last names acting as keycards. Aravind Srinivas is not alone — but he is emblematic of this new chapter in Indian wealth creation.

A Billion-Dollar Beginning, Not A Billion-Dollar Peak

At 31, most have barely found their footing. Srinivas has, instead, found a way to alter how the world finds information. From IIT corridors where branch-change heartbreak existed, to Berkeley labs where curiosity matured, to Silicon Valley where capital met capability — his rise is much more than a net-worth headline. And perhaps the most astonishing part is not that he is the youngest billionaire on the list. It is that he looks like he is only getting started. History remembers those who build tools that redefine how we think, learn and ask questions. If Perplexity succeeds — truly succeeds — Aravind Srinivas may not just be India’s youngest billionaire. He might be one of the architects of how intelligence itself is accessed in the next decade.