Denis Yarats
Computer scientist
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Denis Yarats (born 1987) is a computer scientist and entrepreneur, best known as the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Perplexity AI, an AI-powered search engine launched in 2022.[1][2]
New York University (PhD)
Denis Yarats | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1987 (age 38–39) |
| Education | Belarusian State University (BA) New York University (PhD) |
| Occupations | Software engineer, tech entrepreneur |
| Known for | Co-founder and CTO of Perplexity AI |
Early life and education
Yarats was born in Gomel, USSR, located in modern Belarus. His father was working on a tractor factory and his mother was a housewife. He spent his early life there and in Minsk where he obtained bachelor's degree in Belarusian State University in applied mathematics and IT. [3]In 2008 he became a finalist in Google Code Jam, but failed to get employed due to poor English skills and preparation.[4] He received his Ph.D. in computer science from New York University, where his research focused on reinforcement learning and natural language.[5]
Career
After his graduation in Belarus, Yarats moved to Moscow where he worked in Yandex maps as a Software Engineer. In his early career, Yarats held research positions at several institutions, including Facebook AI Research (FAIR).[citation needed] His work during this time focused on developing scalable algorithms for learning and decision-making in complex environments.[6]
Yarats worked in Seattle as a Software Development Engineer at Microsoft from 2011 to 2013, where he worked on the Bing search engine. From 2013 to 2016, he worked at Quora as a Staff Machine Learning Engineer in charge of technical projects, and from 2016 to 2022 he worked as an AI Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research (FAIR, now Meta AI). [5]
Yarats co‑authored Image Augmentation Is All You Need: Regularizing Deep Reinforcement Learning from Pixels (Yarats, Kostrikov & Fergus, ICLR 2021), which introduced the DrQ method using simple image-based data augmentations to enable model-free RL algorithms like SAC and DQN to learn directly from pixels and achieve state-of-the-art results on both DeepMind Control Suite and Atari 100k benchmarks.[7]
Yarats AI research has been cited over 9,115 times. His work has been praised by other researchers, including Yann LeCun, who later became an angel investor in Perplexity AI. [8]
Perplexity AI
In 2022, Yarats co-founded Perplexity AI alongside Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski.[9] He met Srinivas during student exchange program in Berkeley. As CTO, he led the development of the company's flagship product, an AI powered search engine designed to deliver concise, source-backed answers to user queries.[10] The platform gained significant user traction and investment, with the company securing over $70 million in Series B funding and reaching millions of active users within two years of its launch.[11] As of 2025, the company had raised $200 million at a $20 billion valuation.[12][13]