Mumbai: The Hurun India Rich List 2025, released on October 1, crowned Shah Rukh Khan as the country’s wealthiest celebrity with an estimated net worth of ₹12,490 crore.

But while Bollywood’s Badshah made headlines by entering the billionaire club for the first time, the spotlight quickly shifted to Aravind Srinivas, the 31-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai who has stormed into the list as India’s youngest billionaire.

With a net worth pegged at ₹21,190 crore, the AI founder and CEO behind Perplexity has become one of the most talked-about names in the global tech world.

Srinivas’s company, a chat-based search platform powered by cutting-edge AI models, is now at the forefront of the generative AI revolution.

Born in Chennai in 1994, Srinivas displayed an early flair for science before heading to IIT Madras, where he also taught courses in reinforcement learning.

He went on to complete his PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021, working on fields ranging from computer vision to image and video generation.

Srinivas’s career trajectory includes stints at the world’s most prestigious AI labs—OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google—where he contributed to breakthroughs such as DALL-E 2, HaloNet, and ResNet-RS.

In 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI along with Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski. The platform, which offers fast, accurate, and conversational search, has rapidly grown a global user base, with India emerging as its largest market.

Riding this momentum, Srinivas is now looking at India not just as a consumer base but as a growth hub—considering setting up an engineering team in Bengaluru or Hyderabad and exploring partnerships across education, healthcare, travel, and shopping.

The 2025 Hurun list may have placed Shah Rukh Khan at the top among celebrities, but the real disruptor is Srinivas, the Chennai-born AI visionary who is redefining India’s billionaire landscape.