Aravind Srinivas, co-founder & chief executive of Perplexity AI, a web-search engine based on artificial intelligence, defended Union minister Piyush Goyal’s remarks that sparked a debate over the quality of startups in India.
“I think it's a very positively provocative comment and meant to instigate to build,” Srinivas said on April 9 during an interaction at the Rising Bharat Summit 2025 being held in New Delhi.
Recently, Goyal kick started a storm among the startups, saying Indian firms need to aspire bigger and there has been a slide in the ecosystem in comparison with the Chinese companies.
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“Should we aspire to be, or are we going to be happy being delivery boys and girls?” Goyal asked at Startup Mahakumbh 2025 in New Delhi on April 3. Goyal highlighted the stark contrast between the two countries, arguing that India’s startup space was too focused on food delivery and gig work.
Srinivas, meanwhile, urged venture capitalists (VCs) to take more risks and not to be worried about their capital.
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"VCs in India are still very risk averse, and they like to invest in things that they wouldn't lose money on, rather than investing in things they would potentially make a lot of money on, but are okay, losing some money in some incorrect bets," he said at the summit.
The top executive further said that the mindset of VCs should be like - 95 percent of my investments would fail, but 5 percent of my investments would return me 100/1,000x - that mindset doesn't exist in India VC.
Srinivas noted that India is in the top 10 countries for the company as of now and probably "even close to the top five" in terms of revenue, adding that the firm plans to incorporate more content such as entertainment, TV shows, movies that cater to the local audience.
The Perplexity chief also revealed that the company is thinking about an India-specific pricing but he "does not know the number yet".
"Our inference is expensive, we don't want to put a lower tier quality product for saving costs," he said.
Moreover, Srinivas encouraged engineers to use AI for coding. "If you're not using AI when you're writing code, you're essentially stagnating yourself by sticking with the old workflow and old whole tooling."
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