Meet India's Youngest Billionaire. His Net Worth Is Rs 21,190 Crore

Aravind Srinivas, the 31-year-old Chennai-born AI entrepreneur, has entered the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025 as the country's youngest billionaire. With an estimated net worth of Rs 21,190 crore, Srinivas, the founder and CEO of the AI startup Perplexity, is now a prominent name in the tech world, especially in generative AI.

Born on June 7, 1994, in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, Srinivas developed an early interest in science.

While studying at IIT Madras, he also taught courses on reinforcement learning and advanced reinforcement learning.

He then pursued a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley, completing it in 2021. His research spanned contrastive learning for computer vision, reinforcement learning, transformer-based models for image generation, image recognition and video generation. He also taught Deep Unsupervised Learning during the Spring semesters of 2020 and 2021, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Professional Journey

Srinivas gained industry experience at some of the world's leading tech giants. He worked at OpenAI on reinforcement learning and later joined DeepMind in London, where he focused on contrastive learning. Following this, he spent time at Google developing vision models such as HaloNet and ResNet-RS. He then returned to OpenAI as a research scientist, contributing to DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generation model.

Entrepreneurship

In August 2022, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. The company's AI-powered chat-based search engine aims to provide fast, accurate and trustworthy answers to user queries, using models such as GPT-3.

Since January 2023, Srinivas has also been an angel investor in promising AI startups, including ElevenLabs, a text-to-speech platform, and Suno, which develops text-to-music tools.

Tapping India

As Perplexity's user base in India grew to become its largest globally, Srinivas identified the country as central to the company's growth strategy. This traction has prompted him to explore initiatives beyond product development, including setting up a Perplexity fund for strategic investments. According to a report in ET, he is also considering establishing an engineering team in India, either in Bengaluru or Hyderabad, while being open to partnerships in travel, shopping, education and healthcare.