When Michael Dell slid into IIT Madras graduate's DM on LinkedIn

Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity AI and had previously interned at DeepMind, Google, and OpenAI before assuming the role of a research scientist at OpenAI.

Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based search startup Perplexity AI, recently shared a screenshot of a message he received from billionaire Michael Dell, complimenting the startup that was launched 16 months ago.

Srinivas said the founder and chief executive of Dell Technologies sent a message “out of the blue” shortly after Perplexity AI was launched. The message was sent in January 2023.

The short message from Dell on LinkedIn was simply “Cool app. Well done”.

Srinivas responded in minutes, thanking Dell for his words. “It’s an honour to hear from you,” he wrote back.

“There's a misconception that anyone who tweets about Perplexity is an investor shilling the product,” Srinivas wrote on X, sharing a screenshot of the message from Michael Dell.

“This is Michael Dell, who messaged out of the blue, soon after we launched Perplexity, a year ago, appreciating the product. The product gets genuine user love.”

There's a misconception that anyone who tweets about Perplexity is an investor shilling the product. This is Michael Dell, who messaged out of the blue, soon after we launched Perplexity, a year ago, appreciating the product. The product gets genuine user love. pic.twitter.com/s7yUlvuPMJ

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 9, 2024

Perplexity AI, 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.

Srinivas recently also shared a selfie with Microsoft chief Satya Nadella, taking a dig at Google. "Let's make them dance," he captioned the post on X.

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.