OpenAI poaches Uber India’s chief to run its biggest market outside the United States

OpenAI has appointed Prabhjeet Singh, the outgoing president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India. Singh will join in September and report to Kiran Mani, the company’s managing director for Asia Pacific, OpenAI told TechCrunch. He will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations in what OpenAI has called its second-largest market after the United States.

Singh spent nearly 11 years at Uber, joining in August 2015 as head of strategy before becoming president in June 2020. Before Uber he was an associate partner at McKinsey, where he advised clients across financial services, telecom, and consumer technology. He is an alumnus of IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad.

The hire is the latest in a string of investments OpenAI has made in India over the past year. The company opened its first office in New Delhi last August and said earlier this year it would establish additional offices in Mumbai and Bengaluru. In 2024 it hired former Truecaller and Meta executive Pragya Misra to lead public policy and partnerships, a role later expanded to head of strategy and global affairs.

OpenAI had also brought on former Twitter India head Rishi Jaitly as a senior adviser to help shape its engagement with the Indian government on AI policy. Mani himself, a former JioStar CEO who previously spent 13 years at Google, was appointed to lead the Asia Pacific region in March.

India’s importance to OpenAI is backed by numbers. CEO Sam Altman said in February that the country has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, and that users aged 18 to 24 account for nearly half of all messages sent from India. The company has since struck partnerships spanning higher education, enterprise payments with Pine Labs, web streaming with Reliance’s JioHotStar, and data centre capacity with Tata Group.

The appointment also arrives as India’s AI landscape grows more contested. Rival Anthropic opened its Bengaluru office in late 2025 and in January named former Microsoft India managing director Irina Ghose to lead the country. Google, Amazon, and domestic contenders like Sarvam, which reached unicorn status with a $234 million round last month, are all competing for developers and enterprise customers in a market with more than a billion internet users.

The competitive pressure has a geopolitical edge. The US government’s order in June to suspend Anthropic’s most powerful models for non-US users triggered a sovereignty debate in India and concrete proposals for a $5 billion annual fund to build domestic AI capabilities. For OpenAI, putting a seasoned local operator in charge signals that it takes the risk of being seen as a foreign dependency seriously.

Singh inherits a mandate that is as much political as commercial. India’s government has embraced AI as a national priority, with Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosting OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google chiefs at the AI Impact Summit in February. But the Anthropic suspension showed how quickly access can be revoked, and Indian policymakers are now weighing how much to rely on American providers.

OpenAI has simultaneously ramped up hiring in India, with open roles including AI deployment engineers, developer experience engineers, a developer marketing lead, a partner director, and solutions engineers. Uber has not yet announced a successor for Singh but is expected to outline its leadership transition plans in the coming weeks.