Founder profile

Denis Yarats: path to Perplexity

Perplexity's CTO came from Belarus by way of Bing, Quora and Meta AI.

Denis Yarats was born in 1987 in Gomel, Belarus. He studied applied mathematics and IT at Belarusian State University in Minsk and then worked as a software engineer at Yandex Maps in Moscow.

He moved to the United States and worked on Bing at Microsoft in Seattle from 2011 to 2013. He was a staff machine learning engineer at Quora from 2013 to 2016.

He earned a PhD in computer science at New York University and spent 2016 to 2022 as an AI research scientist at Facebook AI Research, later Meta AI.

In August 2022 he co-founded Perplexity with Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. He is its Chief Technology Officer and led development of the search product.

Read the full Perplexity AI founder story

Where was Denis Yarats born?

Denis Yarats was born in 1987 in Gomel, in the Belarusian SSR of the Soviet Union, now Belarus.

What is Denis Yarats' education?

He earned a bachelor's degree in applied mathematics and IT at Belarusian State University in Minsk. He holds a PhD in computer science from New York University, focused on reinforcement learning and natural language.

What did Denis Yarats do before Perplexity?

He worked at Yandex Maps in Moscow, Microsoft on Bing from 2011 to 2013, and Quora from 2013 to 2016. From 2016 to 2022 he was an AI research scientist at Facebook AI Research, later Meta AI.