Aravind Srinivas came from Chennai, India, and interned at OpenAI, Google Brain, and DeepMind before founding his own company. He completed his PhD at UC Berkeley, and in 2022 founded Perplexity AI, a search engine built to answer questions instead of listing links. By 2025, Perplexity was valued at over $20 billion.
He came on a student visa, stayed on OPT, and made it work. But the window he used is closing fast. What his story raises is a question a lot of AI researchers and engineers never ask themselves: whether the evidence for an O-1 visa is already sitting in their own history, unassembled.
What Counts as O-1 Visa Evidence for a Founder
USCIS evaluates O-1A petitions against eight defined criteria, and a founder generally needs to satisfy at least three. The evidence doesn’t need to come from a single, dramatic achievement. It accumulates across ordinary career milestones that many researchers and engineers already have on their resume:
- Published or scholarly work, including research papers, technical blog posts with meaningful reach, or conference presentations
- Employment in a critical or leading role at organizations with a distinguished reputation, such as research internships at OpenAI, Google Brain, or DeepMind
- Original contributions of major significance, such as founding a product that materially changed how people search for information
- Press coverage of your work, including coverage of your company’s funding, growth, or technical approach
- High compensation or equity value relative to your field, once your company reaches meaningful valuation
Srinivas’s résumé, PhD research, internships at three of the most selective AI labs in the world, and founding a company that reached a $20 billion valuation, checks several of these boxes independently, even before Perplexity became widely known.
Why Founders Miss Evidence They Already Have
The most common reason a founder doesn’t file an O-1A earlier than they could have is not a lack of qualifying evidence. It’s a lack of documentation habits. Research internships end without a formal letter describing scope and impact. Early press coverage gets buried under later, larger stories. Technical contributions get folded into a company’s general narrative instead of attributed clearly to the individual who built them.
If you are an AI researcher or engineer who has published work, held a research role at a recognized lab, or been recognized in your field in any concrete way, you may already have an O-1A case without realizing it. The gap is usually not the achievement itself, but the paperwork trail behind it.
What to Start Documenting Now
Regardless of where you are in your career, the categories worth tracking from today onward include: internship or employment letters describing your role and its significance, links to any published research or widely read technical writing, press coverage naming you specifically, and compensation or equity terms once your company has meaningful traction. None of this requires waiting until you’re ready to file. It requires treating your existing achievements as evidence, rather than as background.
