Cristiano Ronaldo follows 638 accounts on Instagram, and there appears to be only one Indian on that list
Ronaldo has 679 million followers on Instagram, the highest among athletes, ahead of Lionel Messi’s 517 million
The person is from Perplexity AI, where Ronaldo invested in last December
Cristiano Ronaldo’s Instagram account has thrown up an unusual India link. The football star has 679 million followers on the platform and follows 638 accounts. A quick scan of that list suggests only one of them is Indian: Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI. Beyond football, he also follows MMA fighters, a combat sport Ronaldo enjoys and has put money into.
That stands out because Ronaldo has the biggest Instagram following among athletes. Lionel Messi, his closest contemporary in football, has 517 million followers. Virat Kohli is third with 271 million. Ronaldo’s following list is relatively tight by comparison and is largely made up of teammates, former teammates, football friends, MMA fighters, celebrities, companies he has invested in and commercial partners.
The Indian name on that list is Srinivas, a 32-year-old entrepreneur from Chennai. The link appears to fit Ronaldo’s investment pattern too. He announced the Perplexity AI investment in December last year, according to Hindustan Times, putting Srinivas and his company inside Ronaldo’s small circle of followed accounts.
Why Is He Following?
The simplest explanation is business.
Ronaldo follows Srinivas, who runs Perplexity AI as its co-founder and CEO. He has also invested in the company, making Srinivas more than just another technology founder on the platform.
That investment was announced in December last year. Given Ronaldo’s investment in the company, the Perplexity connection is the clearest reason for the follow.
Who Is Aravind Srinivas?
Srinivas is a Chennai-born entrepreneur.
He made his debut on the M3M Hurun India Rich List 2025 with a net worth of Rs 21,190 crore. That made him the country’s youngest billionaire. He was born on June 7, 1994.
His academic path started at IIT Madras, where he earned dual degrees in Electrical Engineering. He also taught advanced courses on reinforcement learning at IIT Madras. Srinivas later pursued a PhD in Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley. His research covered reinforcement learning, image generation and transformer-based vision models.
His early career took him through some of the best-known AI labs. He worked at OpenAI, Google and DeepMind, where he worked on projects including DALL-E 2, HaloNet and ResNet-RS. That background helped prepare him to start his own company.
What Does It Mean?
The main takeaway is narrow.
Srinivas is understood to be the only Indian followed by Ronaldo on Instagram. That does not, by itself, prove a deeper personal relationship. The brief points only to an apparent business link through Perplexity AI and Ronaldo’s investment.
Srinivas has a much smaller presence on the platform, with 331 thousand followers. He also follows just one account on Instagram — and that account is not Ronaldo. Aravind Srinivas doesn't follow Ronaldo.
So the significance is mostly symbolic. One of the world’s most followed athletes appears to have only one Indian account in his following list, and that account belongs to an AI entrepreneur whose company he has backed.
