#1959
Denis Yarats
United States 39 years old
Overview
- Source of Wealth
- Artificial intelligence
- Industry
- Technology
- Residence
Biography
Denis Yarats is the chief technology officer and cofounder of AI search startup Perplexity, which hit a $20 billion valuation in 2025.
Perplexity uses a mix of AI models to summarize information from different websites and provides footnote-style citations to the source.
The startup is backed by investors including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, AI pioneer Yann LeCun and Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Originally from Belarus, Yarats cofounded Perplexity in August 2022 with Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski and Johnny Ho.
Before starting Perplexity, Yarats was a research scientist at Meta's Facebook AI Research (FAIR) lab and helped create search engine Bing at Microsoft.