The Economic Times

From 'lower middle class' Tamil family, he missed IIT Madras CSE by 0.01, was rejected by MIT. Today, he is the CEO of $20 billion AI startup

Aravind Srinivas, from a financially lower-middle-class Tamil family, missed Computer Science at IIT Madras by 0.01 CGPA and was later rejected by MIT. He turned the setbacks into motivation, topping a machine learning class and earning a PhD from UC Berkeley. After working with OpenAI and Google DeepMind, he co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022. The startup reached a $20 billion valuation in 2025, while Forbes estimates Srinivas net worth at $2.1 billion.