Rishabh Agrawal on Meta offer: It was far higher than $1 million

IIT Bombay graduate and AI entrepreneur Rishabh Agrawal has addressed reports claiming he turned down a million-dollar offer from Meta after working at the company for five months. Last year announcing his departure from Meta, Agarwal shared a post on X and wrote, "This is my last week at @AIatMeta.

It was a tough decision not to continue with the new Superintelligence TBD lab, especially given the talent and compute density.” He continued “But after 7.5 years across Google Brain, DeepMind, and Meta, I felt the pull to take on a different kind of risk.” In the post, he said that by quitting his job, he chose to follow Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg's own advice: “In a world that’s changing so fast, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk”.

Now, Agarwal is back addressing reports claiming that he turned down the million-dollar offer from Meta. In a pinned post of social media platform X (Formerly known as Twitter) Agarwal said the offer was actually higher than reported, but he still chose to leave in order to pursue his own AI startup.

The Meta offer

Agarwal, who briefly worked in Meta in the US, reportedly received an offer worth over Rs 9.5 crore (approx. $1 million).

In his post, he clarified, “The offer was higher than what was reported. I rejected it because I wanted to build something of my own.” His decision has drawn attention across India’s tech community, where lucrative offers from global giants are often seen as career pinnacles. Agrawal’s move highlights a growing trend among young engineers who are opting to build startups in AI and deep tech rather than remain in corporate roles.Rishabh Agrawal focusing on his AI startupAgrawal is now focused on his AI venture, which he says aligns more closely with his long-term vision. He emphasised that while Meta’s offer was financially attractive, the opportunity to innovate independently was more compelling.This reflects a broader shift in India’s tech ecosystem, where graduates from premier institutions like IITs are increasingly choosing entrepreneurship over traditional employment.

Who is Rishabh Agarwal

As per his LinkedIn profile, Agarwal is an IIT-Bombay graduate. With a JEE All India Rank of 33, he completed his Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT-Bombay. He also holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence with the Thesis: Beyond the status quo in deep reinforcement learning.He started his career in May 2016 as an intern with Saavn (now JioSaavn) in Mumbai, where he worked on search and algorithms for three months.

The following summer, in 2017, he interned with Tower Research Capital in Gurugram as part of the algorithmic trading team.In early 2018, Agarwal joined Latent Logic in the Greater Oxford Area as a research intern, focusing on learning from demonstrations. His work there later became part of Waymo, which acquired Latent Logic in December 2019.From June 2018 to May 2023, Agarwal worked at Google Brain as a Senior Research Scientist, where he focused on deep reinforcement learning.

During this period, he co-authored research that won the NeurIPS 2021 Best Paper Award on better evaluation in RL, helped popularize offline deep RL through influential papers such as An Optimistic Perspective on Offline RL and RL Unplugged, and contributed to achieving human-level performance on Atari with human-level efficiency.In May 2023, Agarwal moved to Google DeepMind as a Staff Research Scientist. Over two years, until April 2025, he worked on reinforcement learning, self-improvement, and distillation techniques for large language models (LLMs).In April 2025, he joined Meta Superintelligence Labs as a Research Scientist, focusing on RL scaling and distillation for LLM reasoning. His stint there lasted five months until August 2025.Alongside his industry roles, Agarwal was appointed Adjunct Professor at McGill University in September 2024, a role he continues to hold.

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