India, Oct. 23 -- Aravind Srinivas has never made a "traditional" pitch deck to raise funding for Perplexity AI. Why bother, when he has his own product to do so.

"Famously, the Series A was the only time I made a pitch deck," Srinivas, who co-founded the San Franscisco-based AI startup in 2002, said during a recent Dean's Speaker Series hosted by UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. "After that, I just wrote a memo and invited investors to ask anything they wanted. I'd spend a couple of hours with them. If they wanted deeper data, they could ask Perplexity - it already knows everything."

Srinivas' approach to fundraising shows how AI is changing not only products, but the way startups raise money. In an era defined by real-time intel...