# Aravind Srinivas

> Source: https://aiwiki.ai/wiki/aravind_srinivas
> Updated: 2026-06-23
> Categories: AI Companies, People
> From AI Wiki (https://aiwiki.ai), a free encyclopedia of artificial intelligence. Quote with attribution.

**Aravind Srinivas** (born 1994) is an Indian-American computer scientist and entrepreneur who co-founded and serves as chief executive officer of [Perplexity](/wiki/perplexity), the artificial-intelligence company that operates a conversational answer engine and the Comet web browser. He founded the company in August 2022 with [Denis Yarats](/wiki/denis_yarats), Andy Konwinski, and Johnny Ho after completing a doctorate in computer science at the [University of California, Berkeley](/wiki/uc_berkeley) under the supervision of [Pieter Abbeel](/wiki/pieter_abbeel).[^1][^2]

Before launching Perplexity, Srinivas conducted research at [OpenAI](/wiki/openai), [Google DeepMind](/wiki/google_deepmind), and [Google](/wiki/google), working on policy-gradient reinforcement learning, contrastive representation learning, and vision transformers; he returned to OpenAI as a research scientist in 2021 before leaving in 2022 to start the company.[^3][^4][^5] Under his leadership, Perplexity grew from a small research-driven project into one of the most highly valued private companies in artificial intelligence, reaching a reported valuation of approximately $20 billion in September 2025 and handling roughly 230 million queries per month by late 2024.[^6][^23] Srinivas has summarised his goal plainly: "Our broader vision is to make the planet smarter. After just 30 seconds on Perplexity, you should learn something."[^4]

Srinivas has positioned Perplexity as a direct competitor to traditional web search, has overseen the launch of the Comet browser as an "agentic" interface to the web, and has become a prominent public commentator on the future of AI-driven information retrieval.[^7][^8] He has also been at the center of disputes with major news publishers over the use of their content in Perplexity's answers.[^9][^10]

## Key facts

| | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1994, Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India |
| Nationality | Indian-American |
| Education | B.Tech. and M.Tech. in Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras; Ph.D. in Computer Science, [University of California, Berkeley](/wiki/uc_berkeley) (2021) |
| Doctoral advisor | [Pieter Abbeel](/wiki/pieter_abbeel) |
| Known for | Co-founding and leading [Perplexity](/wiki/perplexity) |
| Title | Co-founder and CEO, [Perplexity](/wiki/perplexity) |
| Company | Perplexity AI, Inc. (San Francisco, California) |
| Perplexity valuation | ~$20 billion (reported, September 2025)[^6] |

## Where did Aravind Srinivas grow up and study?

Srinivas was born and raised in Chennai (formerly Madras), the capital of Tamil Nadu in southern India.[^11] He attended school in Chennai and prepared for the Joint Entrance Examination, the national engineering admissions test, which he has said he narrowly missed qualifying for the computer science programme at the [Indian Institute of Technology Madras](/wiki/iit_madras) by a small fraction of a mark; he instead entered the electrical engineering department.[^11]

From 2012 to 2017, Srinivas pursued a dual-degree programme at IIT Madras, earning a Bachelor of Technology and a Master of Technology in electrical engineering.[^1][^11] During the latter part of his time at IIT Madras he began research in machine learning, mentored by Professor Balaraman Ravindran of the IIT Madras Department of Computer Science, who is widely regarded as one of India's leading reinforcement-learning researchers. Despite being enrolled in the electrical engineering programme, Srinivas pursued research across departments, working on reinforcement-learning agents for Atari video games such as Pong and Breakout and on transfer learning and hierarchical reinforcement learning.[^4][^24] His undergraduate work resulted in papers published or co-authored at major machine-learning venues including the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, and the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS).[^24]

In 2017 he moved to California to begin a doctorate in computer science at the [University of California, Berkeley](/wiki/uc_berkeley). He worked in the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research (BAIR) Lab under [Pieter Abbeel](/wiki/pieter_abbeel), a professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences known for his work in robot learning and reinforcement learning.[^4] His doctoral research, ultimately collected in the 2021 dissertation Representation Learning for Perception and Control, centred on self-supervised representation learning for reinforcement learning and on the application of self-attention and contrastive methods to vision and control problems.[^4][^25] Among the works produced during this period was the 2020 paper "CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning," published at the International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), which showed that contrastive learning of pixel representations could substantially improve sample efficiency in reinforcement-learning agents that operate directly from images.[^25] He also contributed to vision research on Bottleneck Transformers and HaloNet during Google internships, work that helped popularise hybrid convolution-attention architectures for image recognition.[^3]

He has cited Berkeley professors Abbeel and Alexei Efros, as well as fellow researcher John Schulman, as significant influences during his graduate studies.[^4] In 2020 he helped co-create the Berkeley graduate course CS 294: Deep Unsupervised Learning with Abbeel, Peter Chen, and Jonathan Ho.[^4] Srinivas completed his Ph.D. in 2021.[^4]

## What did Aravind Srinivas do before Perplexity?

During his Ph.D. studies, Srinivas held a series of research internships at major industrial AI laboratories that shaped his later product thinking. He spent the summer of 2018 as a research intern at [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) in San Francisco, where he worked under John Schulman on policy-gradient reinforcement-learning algorithms.[^3][^4] In 2019 he interned for five months at [Google DeepMind](/wiki/google_deepmind) in London, contributing to large-scale self-supervised contrastive representation learning and to the development of the second-generation Contrastive Predictive Coding (CPC v2) model.[^3] In 2020 and 2021 he worked at Google Research on computer vision, where he co-authored papers on Bottleneck Transformers and HaloNet that introduced self-attention into convolutional architectures for image recognition.[^3] This combination is unusual: Srinivas is among the few researchers to have worked across all three of the laboratories then considered the most influential in AI, namely OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain.[^4]

After completing his Ph.D., Srinivas joined [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) as a research scientist in 2021. He worked on large language models and diffusion-based generative models during a period when OpenAI was developing systems such as the DALL-E text-to-image model.[^3][^5] He left OpenAI in 2022 to start a company of his own. According to interviews and the University of California, Berkeley Sutardja Center, he had repeatedly suggested to his Berkeley lab mate Peter Chen and others that they should build a startup together; he ultimately co-founded Perplexity with Denis Yarats, Andy Konwinski, and Johnny Ho.[^4][^2]

## When was Perplexity founded and why?

Perplexity AI, Inc. was incorporated in San Francisco in August 2022.[^1][^2] The four co-founders brought together complementary experience: Srinivas had a research background spanning OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google; Denis Yarats had been an AI research scientist at Meta and became the company's chief technology officer; Johnny Ho, a former Quora engineer and quantitative trader at Tower Research Capital, took the role of chief strategy officer; and [Google](/wiki/google) Brain-trained engineer and Databricks founding team member Andy Konwinski joined as a co-founder and investor.[^1][^2]

The team initially built tools that allowed users to query relational databases in natural language, but quickly pivoted to a broader idea: a general-purpose [AI search](/wiki/ai_search) answer engine that combined web search with large language models and returned synthesised answers accompanied by inline citations to the underlying web sources.[^4][^12] Srinivas has described the original product hypothesis as a response to a question he had repeatedly asked himself during his Ph.D.: "What if accessing information felt like talking to a personal research assistant?"[^4] He has also characterised the design in vivid terms, calling Perplexity "this marriage of Wikipedia and ChatGPT having a baby together," a product where "you can still converse and chat like in ChatGPT, but the response would be like a Wikipedia article, with subsections, citations and sources."[^4]

Perplexity's public-facing answer engine launched on 7 December 2022.[^1] The company's stated goal, according to Srinivas, was to combine "search and large language models in a way that produces answers where every part has citations," reducing hallucinations and making AI outputs verifiable.[^12] The initial product served queries through a simple text interface, returning a generated answer accompanied by a numbered list of underlying web references that users could click through to verify any specific claim. This emphasis on citation became one of the company's defining product principles and a recurring talking point in Srinivas's public communication.[^12][^23]

The company's early growth was fuelled by viral demonstrations on Twitter and word of mouth among researchers and engineers; by February 2023 the company reported two million unique monthly visitors.[^1] Initial backers in late 2022 and early 2023 included Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Naval Ravikant, and Jeff Bezos's Bezos Expeditions; an early Series A in 2023 priced the company at roughly $150 million pre-money.[^6][^13]

## How has Perplexity grown under his leadership?

### Product expansion

Under Srinivas's leadership, Perplexity expanded from a single web product into a family of consumer and developer offerings:

* **Mobile and browser clients.** During 2023 the company released a Google Chrome extension and apps for iOS and Android.[^1]
* **Perplexity Pro.** A paid subscription tier, Perplexity Pro, was made widely available in 2024 at $20 per month or $200 per year, offering access to multiple underlying large language models and increased usage limits.[^14]
* **Native Mac application.** Perplexity released a native macOS application through the Mac App Store on 24 October 2024.[^14]
* **Finance and shopping features.** The company added equity-market data tools in October 2024 and a "Shopping Hub" with integrated product search and checkout in November 2024.[^1]
* **Perplexity Assistant.** In January 2025 Perplexity released an Android-based assistant capable of performing multi-step tasks across apps on a user's phone.[^1]
* **Sonar API.** On 21 January 2025 the company launched Sonar, an application programming interface that exposed Perplexity's web-grounded answer engine to outside developers; a more capable Sonar Pro tier followed in March 2025.[^15]
* **Comet browser.** Perplexity unveiled Comet, a Chromium-based web browser with built-in AI agents, on 9 July 2025. Comet was initially available only to subscribers of the company's $200-per-month Max tier. On 2 October 2025 Perplexity made Comet free to the public worldwide, while reserving a "background assistant" feature for Max subscribers.[^7][^16]

Srinivas has described Comet as more than a browser, telling CNBC that it is meant to function as "a true personal assistant" and, in subsequent interviews, framing it as a candidate operating system for AI agents on the web.[^17][^7]

### How much funding has Perplexity raised?

Perplexity has raised capital at a pace that is unusual even by the standards of recent AI startups, with its valuation climbing roughly 17-fold during the 2024 calendar year alone.[^6] Major reported rounds include:

| Round / date | Amount | Reported valuation | Notable investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series A (2023) | early backing | ~$150M pre-money | NEA[^6][^13] |
| January 2024 | $73.6M | ~$520M | Nvidia, Bezos Expeditions[^1][^6] |
| April 2024 | unicorn round | >$1B | [^1] |
| June 2024 | from Vision Fund 2 | ~$3B | SoftBank Vision Fund 2[^6] |
| August / December 2024 | $250M + $500M Series D | ~$9B | SoftBank, IVP[^6] |
| May 2025 | ~$500M | ~$14B | reported by CNBC[^8] |
| July 2025 | $100M extension | ~$18B | [^18] |
| September 2025 | ~$200M | ~$20B | ARR approaching $200M[^6] |

By early 2026, public filings and trade reporting placed Perplexity's enterprise valuation in the low-$20 billion range, and the company had raised roughly $1.5 billion in total funding since its founding.[^1][^6]

### What were the bids for TikTok and Chrome?

In January 2025, as U.S. policymakers pressed for a forced sale of TikTok's U.S. operations, Perplexity submitted a proposal to merge with TikTok U.S.[^19] In August 2025 the company made an unsolicited $34.5 billion all-cash offer to acquire [Google](/wiki/google)'s Chrome browser, which the U.S. Department of Justice had proposed as a possible antitrust remedy in its case against Alphabet. Perplexity's offer included commitments to keep Google as the default search engine in Chrome for 100 months and to invest $3 billion in Chromium over 24 months.[^19] Neither bid was accepted, but both attracted substantial media attention to Srinivas and his company.

### Partnerships and distribution

Perplexity has used commercial partnerships to broaden the distribution of its products. In July 2025 the Indian telecommunications operator Bharti Airtel announced a partnership under which it would offer a twelve-month Perplexity Pro subscription, normally priced at roughly Rs 17,000 (approximately $200), free of charge to its more than 360 million customers in India. The agreement was described by both companies as Perplexity's first partnership with an Indian telecommunications operator and was widely reported as a significant expansion of the company's footprint in one of its largest user markets.[^28]

In December 2025 the Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo announced that he had invested in Perplexity and become a brand ambassador for the company. The arrangement included a co-branded landing page on the Perplexity website and was reported by Bloomberg and other outlets as one of Ronaldo's most prominent technology investments.[^29]

## What disputes has Perplexity had with publishers?

Perplexity has been the subject of repeated complaints and lawsuits from news publishers alleging that the company uses copyrighted articles without permission.

* In June 2024, Forbes publicly accused Perplexity of publishing an article that closely paraphrased a Forbes investigation without adequate attribution.[^9]
* That same month, a Wired investigation reported that Perplexity's crawlers had accessed websites that had explicitly opted out of scraping via the robots.txt protocol and had at times misattributed or fabricated information.[^9]
* In October 2024, News Corp's Dow Jones and the New York Post sued Perplexity in U.S. federal court for copyright infringement.[^20]
* The BBC threatened legal action over content reuse in 2025, and major Japanese newspapers including Yomiuri Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun, and Nikkei filed copyright lawsuits the same year.[^9]
* In August 2025, the internet-infrastructure company Cloudflare published a technical analysis alleging that Perplexity used undeclared "stealth" crawlers that rotated user-agent strings and source networks to fetch content from sites that had blocked its known bots. Perplexity disputed the characterisation and stated that, as an "application-layer" company, it did not train AI models on the content it retrieved.[^26]
* On 22 October 2025, Reddit filed a federal lawsuit in the Southern District of New York against Perplexity and three data-scraping suppliers, alleging that they had circumvented Reddit's anti-scraping defences by harvesting Reddit content from Google search-results pages. The complaint sought damages under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other laws.[^26][^27]
* In late 2025, Amazon issued a cease-and-desist notice and later filed suit in California federal court alleging that Perplexity's Comet browser assistant logged into user accounts on Amazon and disguised automated activity as human clicks.[^27]
* On 5 December 2025, The New York Times filed its own copyright suit against Perplexity, alleging that the company's retrieval-augmented generation system produced "verbatim or near-verbatim reproductions" of Times articles and had hallucinated content falsely attributed to the paper. The Times said it had sent a cease-and-desist letter in October 2024 and had contacted Perplexity multiple times over 18 months.[^10]

In response, Srinivas and his colleagues launched the Perplexity Publishers' Program on 30 July 2024, which committed the company to share advertising and subscription revenue with participating publishers. Initial partners included Time, Fortune, Der Spiegel, The Texas Tribune, and Entrepreneur. The programme was expanded in December 2024 to include publishers in the United Kingdom, Japan, Spain, and Latin America.[^21][^22] Srinivas described the design of the programme as intended to "ensure we have a scalable and sustainable way to align incentives for all parties."[^21] A spokesperson for Perplexity later told TechCrunch, in response to the New York Times suit, that "Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI."[^10]

## What are Aravind Srinivas's public views on AI search?

Srinivas is among the more visible chief executives in the current generation of AI companies. He maintains an active presence on X (formerly Twitter), where he frequently comments on product launches and on the broader competitive landscape in AI search, and he has appeared in long-form interviews on a number of podcasts and broadcast programmes.

In June 2024 he was the guest on episode 434 of the Lex Fridman Podcast, a three-hour-eleven-minute conversation in which he discussed the history and future of AI, the architecture of Perplexity's answer engine, and his philosophy of company building. In that conversation he traced his intellectual lineage from his work at Berkeley to the design choices behind Perplexity, emphasising the role of inline citations as a mechanism for reducing hallucinations and improving accountability in AI outputs.[^12] He has also appeared on CNBC television, including a widely circulated October 2025 interview describing Comet as a "true personal assistant," and on the All-In Podcast, where in March 2026 he drew controversy for characterising AI-driven layoffs as part of a "glorious future" that would enable new entrepreneurship.[^1][^17]

In September 2024, Time magazine named Srinivas to its inaugural Time 100 AI list of the most influential people in artificial intelligence. The accompanying profile noted that he was thirty years old, that Perplexity was handling roughly 230 million queries per month at the time, and that he viewed [Google](/wiki/google) as structurally disinclined to cannibalise its advertising business with AI-native search, an opening he intended Perplexity to exploit.[^23] He has returned repeatedly in interviews and on social media to the argument that incumbent search providers face a structural conflict between their existing advertising revenue and the lower-margin economics of AI-native answer experiences.[^23][^17]

Srinivas has consistently framed Perplexity's mission as building a "trustworthy" answer engine that supplies citations for every claim it makes, contrasting that approach with general-purpose chatbots that present synthesised text without sourcing.[^12] Reflecting on his academic roots, he has compared the design to scholarly writing: "Ph.D. students write papers, and for every sentence they write, they reference another paper."[^4] He has argued in interviews and on social media that the future of consumer search is "agentic," meaning that browsers and assistants should not only retrieve information but take actions on a user's behalf, and that the Comet browser is the company's principal expression of that thesis. In discussions of Comet he has described the browser as a step toward "the OS for AI," referring to the user-facing operating environment through which people will increasingly interact with autonomous agents.[^7][^17]

In addition to his role at Perplexity, Srinivas has been an active angel investor since 2023, backing early-stage startups in AI and adjacent fields.[^11] He has delivered guest lectures at his alma maters, including a leadership lecture at IIT Madras in early 2024, and has spoken at university and industry events on entrepreneurship in artificial intelligence.[^24]

Srinivas has also engaged in extended public exchanges with executives at other AI laboratories on X, including [Sam Altman](/wiki/sam_altman) of [OpenAI](/wiki/openai) and Elon Musk of xAI, debating product strategy, model evaluation, and the appropriate role of advertising in AI-driven search. Coverage of these exchanges in trade publications has emphasised the unusual visibility of an early-stage chief executive who routinely engages with the leaders of the largest model providers on a public platform.[^17][^23]

He has spoken in interviews about lessons he draws from running a fast-growing AI company in a competitive landscape dominated by much larger incumbents. Recurring themes include the value of focusing on a single, narrowly defined user problem (in his telling, "answers, with citations"), the importance of shipping products quickly and iterating with users, and the role of a research culture in maintaining technical defensibility as larger model providers commoditise individual capabilities.[^4][^12]

## Personal life

Srinivas has shared little detail about his personal life in public, and few biographical particulars beyond his birthplace, education, and career trajectory have been independently verified. He has spoken in interviews about growing up in Chennai and about the influence of his time at IIT Madras and Berkeley on his approach to building Perplexity.[^4][^11] He is based in San Francisco, where Perplexity is headquartered.[^1]

## See also

* [Perplexity](/wiki/perplexity)
* [AI search](/wiki/ai_search)
* [Pieter Abbeel](/wiki/pieter_abbeel)
* [OpenAI](/wiki/openai)
* [Google DeepMind](/wiki/google_deepmind)
* [University of California, Berkeley](/wiki/uc_berkeley)
* [Denis Yarats](/wiki/denis_yarats)

## References

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI, "Perplexity AI", Wikipedia.
[^2]: https://www.business-standard.com/technology/tech-news/what-is-the-perplexity-ai-founded-by-indian-origin-aravind-srinivas-nc-125021800789_1.html, "What is the Perplexity AI, founded by Indian-origin Aravind Srinivas?", Business Standard.
[^3]: https://techfundingnews.com/inside-perplexity-ai-lesser-known-facts-about-co-founder-aravind-srinivas/, "5 facts you didn't know about Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI", Tech Funding News.
[^4]: https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2025/03/berkeley-alum-wants-to-make-the-planet-smarter/, "Berkeley alum wants to 'make the planet smarter'", Berkeley Engineering.
[^5]: https://scet.berkeley.edu/aravind-srinivas-lessons-from-building-perplexity-ai/, "Perplexity Decoded: Lessons from the Founder/CEO and his PhD Advisor", UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.
[^6]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/09/10/perplexity-reportedly-raised-200m-at-20b-valuation/, "Perplexity reportedly raised $200M at $20B valuation", TechCrunch.
[^7]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/02/perplexitys-comet-ai-browser-now-free-max-users-get-new-background-assistant/, "Perplexity's Comet AI browser now free; Max users get new 'background assistant'", TechCrunch.
[^8]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/12/perplexity-funding-round-comet.html, "Perplexity AI wrapping talks to raise $500 million at $14 billion valuation", CNBC.
[^9]: https://fortune.com/2025/08/26/perplexity-lawsuits-publishers-ai-search-nikkei-news-corp/, "Perplexity wants to play nice with publishers. They keep suing it anyway", Fortune.
[^10]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/12/05/the-new-york-times-is-suing-perplexity-for-copyright-infringement/, "The New York Times is suing Perplexity for copyright infringement", TechCrunch.
[^11]: https://www.businesstoday.in/technology/news/story/meet-aravind-srinivas-from-chennai-to-silicon-valley-the-tech-visionary-eyeing-tiktok-462245-2025-01-28, "Meet Aravind Srinivas: From Chennai to Silicon Valley, the tech visionary eyeing TikTok", Business Today.
[^12]: https://lexfridman.com/aravind-srinivas/, "#434: Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet", Lex Fridman Podcast.
[^13]: https://aifundingtracker.com/perplexity-ai-valuation-growth-strategy/, "How Perplexity AI Reached $9B Valuation in 18 Months", AI Funding Tracker.
[^14]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/10/24/perplexity-launches-a-native-mac-app/, "Perplexity launches a native Mac app", TechCrunch.
[^15]: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/21/perplexity-launches-sonar-an-api-for-ai-search/, "Perplexity launches Sonar, an API for AI search", TechCrunch.
[^16]: https://www.ibm.com/think/news/comet-perplexity-take-agentic-browser, "Comet: Perplexity's AI browser gets personal", IBM Think.
[^17]: https://www.cnbc.com/video/2025/10/03/perplexity-ceo-aravind-srinivas-comet-browser-is-meant-to-be-a-true-personal-assistant.html, "Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas: Comet browser is meant to be 'a true personal assistant'", CNBC.
[^18]: https://www.pymnts.com/artificial-intelligence-2/2025/perplexity-ai-hits-18-billion-valuation-in-latest-funding-round/, "Perplexity AI Hits $18 Billion Valuation in Latest Funding Round", PYMNTS.
[^19]: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/8/12/perplexity-ai-makes-unsolicited-34-5bn-bid-to-buy-google-chrome, "Perplexity AI makes unsolicited $34.5bn bid to buy Google Chrome", Al Jazeera.
[^20]: https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/22/publishers_sue_perplexity_ai/, "Major publishers sue Perplexity AI for scraping content", The Register.
[^21]: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/07/30/perplexity-ai-to-share-revenue-with-publishers-after-plagiarism-accusations.html, "Perplexity AI will share revenue with publishers after plagiarism accusations", CNBC.
[^22]: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/perplexity-expands-its-publisher-program/, "Perplexity expands its publisher program", TechCrunch.
[^23]: https://time.com/7012698/aravind-srinivas/, "Aravind Srinivas: The 100 Most Influential People in AI 2024", Time.
[^24]: https://askiitm.com/insightful-reads/how-did-perplexity-ai-founder-aravind-srinivas-study-ai-in-iitm-despite-being-an-electrical-engineering-student/, "How did Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas study AI in IITM despite being an Electrical Engineering Student?", AskIITM.
[^25]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2004.04136, Aravind Srinivas, Michael Laskin and Pieter Abbeel, "CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning", arXiv preprint 2004.04136 (2020).
[^26]: https://ppc.land/perplexity-denies-training-ai-models-as-cloudflare-documents-stealth-crawlers/, "Perplexity denies training AI models as Cloudflare documents stealth crawlers", PPC Land.
[^27]: https://www.aicerts.ai/news/amazon-v-perplexity-ai-web-scraping-showdown/, "Amazon v Perplexity: AI Web Scraping Showdown", AI CERTs News.
[^28]: https://www.airtel.in/press-release/07-2025/airtel-partners-with-perplexity-powers-every-single-of-its-360mn-customers-with-perplexity-pro/, "Airtel partners with Perplexity, powers every single of its 360mn customers with Perplexity Pro", Bharti Airtel press release.
[^29]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-05/cristiano-ronaldo-invests-in-perplexity-ai-enters-partnership-misnf0af, "Cristiano Ronaldo Invests in Perplexity AI, Enters Partnership", Bloomberg.