An IIT Bombay computer science graduate has drawn attention after walking away from a high-paying role at Meta to build his own AI startup. Rishabh Agarwal resigned from a position that paid about $1 million a year (around Rs 8.5 crore), choosing entrepreneurship over a global tech career.
Agarwal secured All India Rank 33 in JEE and later completed a PhD at MILA, an AI research institute in Canada. He has worked on AI-focused roles across Google Brain, Google DeepMind, Waymo and Meta’s superintelligence lab, and has also served as a professor at McGill University.
He joined Meta’s superintelligence lab in 2025, but quit within five months. In a post, Agarwal said that after about 7.5 years across major companies, he wanted to take a different kind of risk, citing advice attributed to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg that not taking risks in a fast-changing world can be the biggest risk.
After leaving, he founded a startup called Periodic Labs instead of joining another multinational firm. The company aims to validate possibilities in modern scientific experiments and accelerate discoveries in new materials, medicines and physics.
Periodic Labs has received support from Nvidia and Jeff Bezos, helping it emerge as a closely watched name in the scientific research ecosystem.
