Indian technology professional Rishabh Agarwal has responded to online claims that he turned down a $1 million job offer from Meta to launch his own venture. Agarwal, an IIT Bombay graduate, previously worked at Google Brain, DeepMind and Waymo before joining Meta. He left the company after five months to co-found Periodic Labs, which is developing an AI system capable of generating hypotheses for experiments in materials, medicine and physics. Reports circulating on social media stated that Meta offered him an annual package of around 9.5 crore rupees. Agarwal clarified that the actual compensation was substantially higher than the widely cited figure. The startup has received backing from investors including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA.
