IIT Madras alumnus takes a dig at Google with a Satya Nadella selfie: ‘Let’s make them dance’

Aravind Srinivas posted a selfie with Satya Nadella. (Image credit: @AravSrinivas/X)

Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based search startup Perplexity AI, shared a selfie with Microsoft boss Satya Nadella on Wednesday.

“Let’s make them dance,” he captioned the post on X, as he responded to another post that said it is Perplexity AI that could give a tough competition to search engine giant Google.

“Microsoft wanted to make Google dance... but I think it's actually going to be Perplexity,” Jeff Huber, a San Fransico-based tech entrepreneur, had written, to which Srinivas responded with a photo with Satya Nadella.

Let’s make them dance. https://t.co/MTED9HpbZp pic.twitter.com/yJKYd6gZ4m

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 11, 2024

Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma was among those who ‘liked’ the photo shared by the Indian-origin entrepreneur.

Perplexity AI, the 16-month-old AI (artificial intelligence) startup founded by Srinivas, Denis Yarats (former Facebook AI research scientist), Andy Konwinski (co-founder of Databricks), and Johnny Ho (former Quora engineer), last week bagged $73.6 million in funding from US chip maker Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others.

Perplexity AI challenges industry giants such as Google and Microsoft Bing in the search engine space.

The funding round valued the startup at $520 million. The company has raised $100 million to date.

Aravind Srinivas, an alumnus of IIT-Madras, had previously interned at DeepMind, Google and OpenAI before assuming the role of a research scientist at OpenAI.

The funding also comes at a time when tech giants Google and Microsoft are incorporating AI into their search engines.

Perplexity features a chatbot-style interface, enabling users to ask questions using day-to-day language. Similar to Microsoft, Perplexity provides an AI assistant named Copilot.