Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, Aravind Srinivas, has joined Astra as an angel investor, lending his expertise and resources to the AI startup. Founded in 2023 by IIT alumni Supreet Hegde and Ranjan Rajagopalan, Astra aims to revolutionise sales workflows by building the AI Sales Agent.
Astra’s mission is to replace traditional SaaS tools with AI agents capable of automating non-customer-facing sales tasks and providing real-time nudges for better sales execution.
By focusing on accuracy and human-level performance, Astra seeks to double active opportunities per sales representative and significantly boost win rates.
This partnership further solidifies Srinivas’s commitment to advancing artificial intelligence and supporting innovative Indian-led ventures.
Saas AI Agents
Hegde announced Srinivas’s involvement in Astra, highlighting his reputation as one of the most influential entrepreneurs of this era. “From day one, Aravind’s advice has been clear—focus on being an AI company first (not just a sales company) and build world-class AI products for your customers,” posted Hegde.
Hegde believes that AI Agents will replace human workflows, unlike traditional SaaS tools that merely served as support systems with no concept of accuracy. “Building AI products that can truly perform human level tasks is an incredibly complex challenge, and staying focused on AI from day one is critical,” he said.
Srinivas Leads
Srinivas’s investments extend beyond Perplexity, with a portfolio that includes several AI startups such as ElevenLabs and Pika. Coming in as an investor for Astra adds to his portfolio of investments backing agentic AI startups in the Saas sector.
Earlier, Srinivas committed to invest $1million and dedicate support and mentorship to support Indian AI initiatives. Interestingly, payment provider Paytm announced their partnership with Perplexity to integrate AI-powered search into their app to help customers with financial decisions.
While Srinivas is supporting AI startups, he is actively working on pushing his platform. There are a number of features that Perplexity has been rolling out over the last month.
Perplexity is now developing an agentic web browser called Comet, aiming for a seamless assistive experience like GitHub Copilot. Comet looks to enter a market dominated by browsers such as Chrome and Safari.
