2017/DD/EE Co-Founder & CEO, Perplexity.ai, USA
Dr. Aravind Srinivas is a computer scientist and entrepreneur who has helped shape the modern concept of an answer engine — a system that responds directly to questions with clear, source-backed answers. He earned his Dual Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 2017. He subsequently earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley, where his research spanned machine learning, reinforcement learning, contrastive learning, transformers, and vision-language models.
During his doctoral years, Dr. Aravind combined academic depth with hands-on research experience across the strongest AI labs in the world. He completed research internships at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google, contributing to areas such as policy gradient methods, large scale contrastive learning, and transformer-based vision models. At Berkeley, he also served as a teaching assistant for the Deep Unsupervised Learning course, reflecting a clear commitment to sharing knowledge and building the next generation of researchers.
Following his Ph.D., Dr. Aravind joined OpenAI as a Research Scientist, working on advanced generative modeling and language-focused research. In August 2022, he co-founded Perplexity and now serves as its President and CEO. Under his leadership, the company has focused on expanding access to the world’s knowledge and making AI more reliable by post-training frontier models for higher accuracy and developing orchestration systems to harness them more effectively, and by building products that are designed around accuracy, utility, and human curiosity.
Beyond his core work, Dr. Aravind has been recognized for both technical excellence and real world impact. His background includes early national level academic honors such as the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana and the National Talent Search Scholarship. He has also supported the broader AI ecosystem as an active angel investor in emerging AI-first companies across developer tools, voice, video, and foundational model research.
In recognition of his outstanding journey from IIT Madras to the frontiers of AI research and product innovation, and for his leadership in building systems that raise the bar for trustworthy information access, the Indian Institute of Technology Madras and its alumni are proud to confer Dr. Aravind Srinivas with the Young Alumni Achiever Award 2026.
