OpenAI poaches Uber India chief to lead its biggest market outside the U.S.

OpenAI has appointed former Uber India president Prabhjeet Singh as its first managing director for India, marking a significant expansion in what the company calls its largest market outside the United States. Singh, who announced his resignation from Uber on Friday, will join OpenAI in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company's managing director for Asia-Pacific, the company told TechCrunch [1]. He will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across the country [1]. The appointment follows a series of investments by OpenAI in India. The company opened its first office in New Delhi last August and earlier this year said it would establish additional offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru [1]. In 2024, it hired former Truecaller and Meta executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships before expanding her role to head of strategy and global affairs [1]. OpenAI had previously brought on former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to help establish engagement with the Indian government on AI policy [1]. India has become a key battleground for U.S. AI companies, driven by its vast developer base, more than a billion internet users, and surging demand for generative AI [1]. Rival Anthropic opened its India office in Bengaluru in late 2025 and earlier this year named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose as its India head [1]. OpenAI has pointed to rapidly growing adoption of ChatGPT in the country as a sign of the market's importance, and Indian conglomerates Reliance and Tata Group are among its early partners [1]. The company's India push comes amid broader organizational changes at OpenAI. The organization, founded in 2015 as a nonprofit, underwent a restructuring in 2025 that converted its for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation partially controlled by the nonprofit foundation [7]. Microsoft has invested over $13 billion into OpenAI and provides Azure cloud computing resources [7]. In October 2025, OpenAI conducted a $6.6 billion share sale that valued the company at $500 billion [7]. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's deprioritization of safety goals [7]. OpenAI has simultaneously ramped up hiring in India, with openings including AI deployment engineers, developer experience engineers, a developer marketing lead, a partner director, and solutions engineers [1]. Over the past few months, the company struck partnerships spanning higher education, enterprise payments, AI-powered commerce, and web streaming, while also becoming part of the country's growing data center build-out [1].