FROM CHENNAI TO SILICON VALLEY

On a sweltering afternoon in Chennai, a teenage boy sat depressed in his hostel room at IIT Madras.

- 

Aravind Srinivas had just missed securing admission to Computer Science by a negligible percentage point. Engineering's most prestigious track had slipped through his fingers.

Fast forward to October 2025: that same boy, now 31, debuted on the M3M Hurun India Rich List with a net worth of ₹211 billion, roughly $2.5 billion, becoming India's youngest billionaire. His company, Perplexity AI, reached an $18 billion valuation, positioning him not merely as a successful entrepreneur but as a generational standard-bearer for a transformed Indian tech diaspora.

From Vengeance to Vision

Srinivas's disappointment became his crucible. "I went into a whole shell," he recently recalled during an interview. "But that's when I discovered online lectures, online competitive programming sites. I started coding a lot. As a kid, it was more out of vengeance - 'let me prove the world wrong, I'm actually good at this.'"

While studying Electrical Engineering—not his first choice—Srinivas acquired programming skills that placed him ahead of Computer Science students. His journey took him from IIT Madras to UC Berkeley for his PhD, with pivotal research internships at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google between 2019 and 2022. These weren't mere résumé lines but masterclasses in how the world's most sophisticated AI systems operated.

Challenging the Giants