Orama is an open-source search company building an 'answer engine' for developers - a lightweight, high-performance stack that bundles full-text, vector, and hybrid search with automatic embedding generation and built-in LLMs. Started as the open-source project Lyra and incorporated as OramaSearch Inc. in 2023 by Issac Roth and Michele Riva, its core library ships in under 2KB and runs in the browser, on servers, or at the edge. Orama powers site search and AI answers for developer platforms including nodejs.org, tanstack.com, and solidjs.org, and its OramaCore runtime packages a search engine, vector database, and LLM interface into one deployable unit.

Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, the citation-backed AI answer engine that reached a $21B+ valuation in under three years. Born in Chennai in 1994, he earned a dual degree from IIT Madras before completing a PhD at UC Berkeley, then worked as a researcher at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google Brain before founding Perplexity in 2022. India's youngest billionaire at 31, he has positioned Perplexity as a direct challenger to Google Search by insisting that every AI-generated answer carry verifiable citations - a principle he lifted straight from academic paper standards.

Perplexity AI is a San Francisco-based AI company that built the world's leading 'answer engine' ? replacing traditional link-based search with real-time, AI-generated responses that cite their sources. Founded in August 2022 by four AI researchers from OpenAI, Meta, Databricks, and Quora, Perplexity has grown from a scrappy post-ChatGPT prototype to a $20B+ company with 45 million monthly active users, over $1.7B in total funding, and a product suite spanning a conversational search engine, a developer API platform, and the Comet AI browser.