OpenAI Appoints Former Uber India Chief to Lead Growth in Its Largest Market Beyond the US

OpenAI is making another major investment in India by appointing Prabhjeet Singh, former president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for the country. The move is aimed at strengthening the company’s presence in what it has identified as its second-largest market after the United States.

Singh, who announced his departure from Uber on Friday, is scheduled to join OpenAI in September and will report to Kiran Mani, the company’s managing director for the Asia-Pacific region, OpenAI said. In his new role, Singh will oversee the company’s performance across India, including consumer growth, enterprise adoption, strategic partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operational activities.

The appointment represents OpenAI’s latest step in expanding its footprint in India. The company opened its first office in New Delhi last August and announced earlier this year that it plans to establish additional offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In 2024, OpenAI recruited former Truecaller and Meta executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships, and last year expanded her responsibilities to include strategy and global affairs. The company had also previously brought in former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to help strengthen its engagement with the Indian government on AI policy.

Over the past several months, OpenAI has entered into multiple partnerships across India covering higher education, enterprise payments, AI-powered commerce, and web streaming, while also participating in the country’s expanding data centre infrastructure. The company has repeatedly pointed to the rapid adoption of ChatGPT in India as evidence of the market’s growing importance. Indian business groups Reliance and Tata Group are also among OpenAI’s early strategic partners in the country.

At the same time, OpenAI has accelerated recruitment efforts in India, advertising positions that include AI deployment engineers, developer experience engineers, a developer marketing lead, a partner director, and solutions engineers.

India has become one of the most important competitive markets for U.S. artificial intelligence companies, supported by its vast developer community, a population of more than 1 billion internet users, and rapidly growing demand for generative AI technologies. Rival Anthropic established its India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and, earlier this year, appointed former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead its operations in the country.