AI NEWS PAGE DOSSIER
Aravind Srinivas
Aravind Srinivas's file: research, Perplexity, AI search, agents, publisher fights, and the attempt to rebuild the web's front door around answers.
Srinivas came out of Berkeley's robot-learning scene, spent time at OpenAI, then co-founded Perplexity and turned citation-backed AI answers into a direct challenge to the search business, eventually extending that challenge into its own browser.
HOW THE HELL DID ARAVIND SRINIVAS GET HERE?
Aug 2021
HE FINISHES A PHD IN ROBOT LEARNING
Srinivas completed his Berkeley PhD on representation learning for perception and control, emerging from the university's Robot Learning Lab.
RECEIPTS: UC Berkeley Robot Learning Labreported
2021
THE NEW PHD GOES TO OPENAI
Berkeley's Robot Learning Lab listed Srinivas's next position as research scientist at OpenAI, where he worked before starting his own company.
RECEIPTS: UC Berkeley Robot Learning Labreported
2022
HE CO-FOUNDS PERPLEXITY
After his PhD and a year at OpenAI, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity in 2022 around an AI search product that answers questions with web citations.
RECEIPTS: UC Berkeley Engineeringreported
Nov 6, 2024
THE AI SEARCH ENGINE CHASES A $9 BILLION VALUATION
Perplexity sought roughly $500 million in new financing at a $9 billion valuation, after a January round had valued the company at about $520 million.
RECEIPTS: Reutersreported
Oct 21, 2025
THE SEARCH STARTUP WANTS THE BROWSER TOO
By late 2025 Perplexity had launched its Comet browser and was handling more than 300 million queries a week, extending Srinivas's search challenge into the browser itself.
RECEIPTS: Berkeley Haasreported