Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, a web search engine powered by AI, came to the defence of Union Minister Piyush Goyal's recent comments that sparked a debate regarding the quality of startups in India. During a conversation at the Rising Bharat Summit 2025 in New Delhi on April 9, Srinivas called Goyal's comments "positively provocative" and meant to motivate progress.

Goyal had earlier caused a stir at the Startup Mahakumbh 2025 on April 3, saying that Indian startups must shoot for the stars, highlighting a dip in the ecosystem as against Chinese firms. He asked, "Should we aspire to be, or are we going to be happy being delivery boys and girls?" pointing to the excessive focus on food delivery and gig economy in India's startup ecosystem.

During his comments, Srinivas called on venture capitalists (VCs) to take more risk and not worry so much about their investments. He pointed out that Indian VCs are risk-averse, investing in more secure ventures instead of ventures that could bring them big returns, even if this means taking some losses on less successful ventures. He stressed that VCs should have a mentality where they anticipate 95% of their investments to fail and the other 5% will return 100 to 1,000 times their investment a mindset he believes is missing from the Indian VC community.

Srinivas also stated that India is among the top 10 nations for Perplexity AI in revenue, and they may be close to the top five. The firm intends to diversify its content to cover entertainment, TV series, and films specifically for the local market. He said that they are looking at an India specific pricing strategy, but he did not reveal exact numbers.

Moreover, Srinivas urged engineers to adopt AI in their coding habits, saying, "If you're not using AI when you're writing code, you're essentially stagnating yourself by sticking with the old workflow and old tooling."