A Company That Boosted Its Valuation to 16x In Less Than A Year
Know how Perplexity AI was founded by an IIT Madras student and turned into a company with a $9 billion valuation.
Aravind Srinivas was born in Chennai, India. When he was eighteen, he joined IIT, Madras, the best engineering institute in India.
Aravind wanted to be admitted to the Computer Science branch of the college but got electrical engineering instead. The college allows students to change their branch after completing the first semester if they score above the set CGPA.
He took the exam and fell short of just a 0.01 CGPA. He was not able to change the branch and felt depressed for a year.
In the third year of college, he realised that he had to be in the same course and studying the subject with interest was way more fulfilling than just running to get good grades.
Srinivas got genuinely excited about AI, machine learning, and neural networks. He started to watch Stanford lectures for hours and took many courses to learn programming.
Getting Admission To UC Berkeley
During his time at IIT, Aravind started learning Python, which was not so popular amongst his fellow college mates back then.
He took a machine-learning class taught by Prof. Balaraman Ravindran, one of the few professors in India who focused on AI research.
Despite being from an electrical engineering background, Aravind performed exceptionally well, usually topped the class, and other faculty members started recognising him.
Prof. Ravindran recommended Aravind to a renowned computer scientist, Yoshua Bengio. He accepted Srinivas to intern with him, and later, Bengio wrote a recommendation letter for Aravind’s PhD admissions.
With Yoshua’s support, Aravind applied to MIT and UC Berkeley. He was accepted into the University of California in 2017 for the PhD program.
He pursued research on reinforcement learning and generative models under influential researchers like John Schulman, associated with OpenAI.
Founding Perplexity
After completing his PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley, Aravind joined OpenAI, where he worked as a research scientist.
During his time at UC Berkeley, a friend of Aravind’s told him to watch a show called ‘Silicon Valley.’
Inspired by the show and his work at openAI, He wanted to start a company.
Around 2022, the GitHub co-pilot revolution was taking place, and Aravind knew that the startup movement had arrived and it was the right time to build AI products.
He quit OpenAI and founded his co-founders, Johnny Ho and Denis Yarats. They all wanted to build an AI product which mainly focused on ‘search engines.’
The team identified that the Large Language Model (LLM) could be used to answer questions.
They wanted to build a system where the AI model could reason on-the-fly based on real-time data retrieval.
They launched Perplexity in August 2022, an innovative conversational search engine that revolutionises how people access information online.
Perplexity retrieves information from the web and allows the users to specify their search focus for more targeted results.
It has 10 million monthly active users and more than 75 million monthly visitors. The company has skyrocketed its valuation from around $500 million initially in 2023 to $9 billion as of November 2024.
And that is how Perplexity AI, one of the world’s fastest-growing startups, was built.
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