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  "markdown": "Co-founder and CTO, Perplexity.\n\nDenis Yarats co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and is its chief technology officer. He holds a PhD in computer science from New York University, with research on reinforcement learning and natural language, and earlier worked as a software engineer at Yandex and in research at Facebook AI Research.\n\n## What Denis builds\n\n- [SPACE](https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/perplexity-space.md), graded C, 56.4/100, in Code execution sandboxes. SPACE is Perplexity's open-source, self-hosted platform for running agent code in Firecracker microVMs. An operator deploys it on Linux with KVM, and applications drive sandboxes through its HTTP and SSE API or an E2B-compatible API. Co-founder and CTO, Perplexity, researched 2026-10-27.\n\n## Works with\n\n- [Andy Konwinski](https://www.anchorterminal.com/people/andy-konwinski/), Co-founder, Perplexity\n- [Antoine Chaffin](https://www.anchorterminal.com/people/antoine-chaffin/), Member of Technical Staff; decision-model research contributor\n- [Aravind Srinivas](https://www.anchorterminal.com/people/aravind-srinivas/), Co-founder, Perplexity\n- [Jerry Ma](https://www.anchorterminal.com/people/jerry-ma/), VP Global Affairs and Deputy CTO\n- [Johnny Ho](https://www.anchorterminal.com/people/johnny-ho/), Co-founder, Perplexity\n\n## Backed by\n\n- [Elad Gil](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/elad-gil/)\n- [Nat Friedman](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/nat-friedman/)\n- [Bob Muglia](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/bob-muglia/)\n- [Pieter Abbeel](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/pieter-abbeel/)\n- [Yann LeCun](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/yann-lecun/)\n- [Andrej Karpathy](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/andrej-karpathy/)\n- [Ashish Vaswani](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/ashish-vaswani/)\n- [Amjad Masad](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/amjad-masad/)\n- [Clem Delangue](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/clem-delangue/)\n- [New Enterprise Associates](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/new-enterprise-associates/)\n- [Databricks](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/databricks/)\n- [Susan Wojcicki](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/susan-wojcicki/)\n- [Paul Buchheit](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/paul-buchheit/)\n- [Soleio](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/soleio/)\n- [IVP](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/ivp/)\n- [NVIDIA](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/nvidia/)\n- [Bezos Expeditions](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/bezos-expeditions/)\n- [Bessemer Venture Partners](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/bessemer-venture-partners/)\n- [Factorial Capital](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/factorial-capital/)\n- [Kindred Ventures](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/kindred-ventures/)\n- [Tobi Lutke](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/tobi-lutke/)\n- [Naval Ravikant](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/naval-ravikant/)\n- [Balaji Srinivasan](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/balaji-srinivasan/)\n- [Guillermo Rauch](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/guillermo-rauch/)\n- [Austen Allred](https://www.anchorterminal.com/investors/austen-allred/)\n\n## Questions\n\n### Who is Denis Yarats?\n\nDenis Yarats co-founded Perplexity in 2022 and is its chief technology officer. He holds a PhD in computer science from New York University, with research on reinforcement learning and natural language, and earlier worked as a software engineer at Yandex and in research at Facebook AI Research.\n\n### What does Perplexity make?\n\nAnchor Terminal lists SPACE from Perplexity. SPACE is Perplexity's open-source, self-hosted platform for running agent code in Firecracker microVMs. An operator deploys it on Linux with KVM, and applications drive sandboxes through its HTTP and SSE API or an E2B-compatible API.\n\n### Who has invested in Perplexity?\n\nThe sources our research read name Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Bob Muglia, Pieter Abbeel, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Ashish Vaswani, Amjad Masad, Clem Delangue, New Enterprise Associates, Databricks, Susan Wojcicki, Paul Buchheit, Soleio, IVP, NVIDIA, Bezos Expeditions, Bessemer Venture Partners, Factorial Capital, Kindred Ventures, Tobi Lutke, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch and Austen Allred.\n\n### How are Denis's tools graded?\n\nSPACE is graded C, 56.4 out of 100, on Anchor Terminal's benchmark, which scores every listing against the same checklist.\n\n## Sources\n\n- https://space.docs.perplexity.ai/guide/index.html\n- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perplexityai/SPACE/main/README.md\n- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/perplexityai/SPACE/main/CONTRIBUTING.md\n- https://docs.perplexity.ai/\n- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perplexity_AI\n- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_Yarats\n- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Konwinski\n\nThese are the people building the tools we list, named for their public role in the company or project behind a listing, from public pages, with the date it was researched. They don't work for Anchor Terminal (our own team is on the about page, /about/#author). We show public roles, public profiles and what the listing pages show, nothing private. To correct something, send an about or a photo, or have a page removed, write to privacy@anchorterminal.com.\n",
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