‘No pitch deck needed’: How Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas secured funding using his own product
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas on how he replaced pitch decks with AI-driven Q&As to secured an investment after a back-and-forth over email.
Aravind Srinivas has never made a “traditional” pitch deck to raise funding for Perplexity AI. Why bother, when he has his own product to do so.
“Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck,” Srinivas, who co-founded the San Franscisco-based AI startup in 2022, said during a recent Dean's Speaker Series hosted by UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. “After that, I just wrote a memo and invited investors to ask anything they wanted. I'd spend a couple of hours with them. If they wanted deeper data, they could ask Perplexity — it already knows everything.”
Srinivas' approach to fundraising shows how AI is changing not only products, but the way startups raise money. In an era defined by real-time intelligence, investors no longer need slides when they can get specific queries answered on demand.
Srinivas went on to underscrore his philosophy with an anecdote.
During a recent funding round, he held an initial discussion with a potential investor, who later sent him a long email of follow-up questions. Instead of drafting a detailed reply himself, he turned to Perplexity's AI browser Comet.
“I copied the entire email, put it into Perplexity, and said, ‘Answer it like Aravind’. Then I just replied to that email with the Perplexity answer link and said: see if this suffices. If not, I can add more context.”
“They said, ‘This is wonderful’, and they wired the money the next day.”
The story captures what AI aims to achieve — replacing time-consuming manual research with conversational AI-assisted reasoning. Srinivas simply extended the idea to fundraising.
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Perplexity AI, which has so far raised more than $100 million from investors such as Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, is positioning itself as a rival to Google Search. In fact, the company made a play for the Google Chrome browser before launching its own AI browser Comet.
