Rising Bharat Summit 2025: Overwhelmed by job applications from India, Perplexity AI founder Srinivas puts hiring on hold

Aravind Srinivas

Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered search startup Perplexity AI’s efforts to hire its first in India have temporarily halted as too many job applications left the company’s CEO Aravind Srinivas overwhelmed and rethinking their hiring strategy.

“We haven't actually hired that one person to really grow our business in India yet,” Srinivas, co-founder of Perplexity, said while speaking at the Rising Bharat Summit 2025 on April 9 in New Delhi. “We've got tons of applications… (but) it got overwhelming to a point where I (had to) make sense of what we really need there before expanding.”

On January 11, 2025, Srinivas announced on LinkedIn that the company is looking to hire a candidate to help expand its operations in India. The role required the candidate to be based in India, work in a startup environment, and travel to meet strategic partners and institutions.

The IIT-Madras graduate said the company initially expected applications only from those with prior experience in business development or general management. But the opportunity attracted a much broader and more diverse talent pool, including several referral candidates, which made shortlisting harder than expected.

Despite the delay in hiring, Perplexity remains committed to deepening its India presence. The company is particularly focused on expanding its cricket-related search and plans to introduce more India-centric content, ranging from entertainment and TV shows to local language support and better regional results.

“There are lots of searches on cricket already happening on Perplexity,” Srinivas said, adding that India is a major growth priority for the company.

Founded in August 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity AI launched its answer engine in December 2022. The company recently closed a $500 million funding round, which tripled its valuation to $9 billion, according to reports.

Backers of the firm include Nvidia, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Institutional Venture Partners (IVP), and Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke.

The answer engine, is challenging tech giants like Google and Microsoft, and currently boasts over 10 million active users worldwide.

The company has even received praise from competitors.

AI data cloud firm Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer, Sridhar Ramaswamy, recently told Moneycontrol that Perplexity’s Application Programming Interface (API)-driven approach allowed it to innovate quickly and build a successful product.

This is particularly significant because Ramaswamy’s own company, Neeva, a competitor to Perplexity AI, tried to build a search engine from the ground up but ultimately found it unsustainable.

“At Neeva, we spent three years creating a search engine from scratch, where we did the crawl, we did the indexing, we did a lot of heavy work. Perplexity came quite a bit later, and they simply relied on APIs and produced a great product. That really was what drove the positive momentum for the company. All startups have limited shelf lives in terms of how much you can keep going. My team in the last year sort of was tired of the uncertainty of being a startup and the relentless number of fundraising rounds that you must do. Perplexity created a great product, and they've been very quick to innovate. I give Aravind (Aravind Srinivas, founder)—also an IIT-Madras graduate, a lot of credit. What they have done is truly remarkable,” Ramaswamy said.