Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas Defends Piyush Goyal’s Remark On Indian Start-ups; Details Inside

Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, an AI-powered web search engine, defended Union Minister Piyush Goyal’s comments that ignited a debate about the quality of startups in India. “I think it's a very positively provocative comment and meant to instigate to build,” Srinivas stated on Wednesday during a discussion at the Rising Bharat Summit 2025 in New Delhi.

Recently, Union Minister Piyush Goyal sparked a debate within the startup community by urging Indian firms to aim higher, noting a decline in the ecosystem compared to their Chinese counterparts.

Aspire Beyond Gig Economy Jobs

In response to the criticism, Goyal referred to the backlash as “unfortunate.” At the Startup Mahakumbh 2025 in New Delhi on April 3, he challenged the industry, asking, “Should we aspire to be, or are we going to be happy being delivery boys and girls?” Goyal highlighted the significant contrast between India and China, suggesting that India's startup sector is overly concentrated on food delivery and gig economy jobs.

"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 stressed that venture capitalists in India should adopt a mindset where they expect 95 per cent of their investments to fail, but the remaining 5 per cent could yield returns of 100x or even 1,000x. He noted that this kind of mindset is currently lacking in Indian venture capital.

Srinivas also highlighted that India ranks among the top 10 countries for his company, and may even be close to breaking into the top five in terms of revenue. He mentioned that the company plans to expand its offerings with more localized content, such as entertainment, TV shows, and movies, to cater to the Indian audience.

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India-Specific Pricing

The Perplexity CEO also shared that the company is considering India-specific pricing, though he said he does not have a specific figure in mind yet. "Our inference is expensive, we don't want to put a lower tier quality product for saving costs," he explained.

Additionally, Srinivas urged engineers to integrate AI into their coding practices. "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," he said.

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