OpenAI poaches Uber India chief to lead its biggest market outside the US

OpenAI is once again making a big, visible bet on India. It has appointed former Uber India and South Asia president Prabhjeet Singh as the country’s first managing director to scale up its presence in what it calls its second-largest market after the US.

Singh, who announced his resignation from Uber on Friday, will join OpenAI in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company’s director of Asia Pacific, the company told TechCrunch. He will be responsible for OpenAI’s performance in India across consumer growth, business adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations, the company said.

The appointment marks OpenAI’s latest investment in India. The company opened its first office in New Delhi last August and said it would do so earlier this year establish new offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In 2024, it hired former Truecaller and Meta director Pragya Misra to lead government policy and partnerships before expanding her role to head of strategy and global affairs last year. OpenAI had earlier appointed Rishi Jaitly, former head of Twitter India, as a senior advisor to help strengthen engagement with the Indian government on AI policy.

In recent months, OpenAI has forged partnerships in the country in higher education, enterprise payments, AI-powered commerce and web streaming, while also becoming part of the country’s growing data center buildout. OpenAI has pointed to the rapidly growing adoption of ChatGPT in India as a sign of the market’s importance. Indian conglomerates Reliance and Tata Group are also among the first partners in the market.

The company has simultaneously increased its workforce in India openings including AI implementation engineers, developer experience engineers, a developer marketing lead, a partner director, and solutions engineers.

India has emerged as one of the key battlegrounds for US AI companies, driven by its massive developer base, more than a billion internet users and rising demand for generative AI. Rival Anthropic opened its India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and appointed former Microsoft India executive Irina Ghose as head of India earlier this year.