OpenAI names Uber India president Prabhjeet Singh as first managing director for India

<cite index="21-2,23-2">OpenAI appointed Prabhjeet Singh, the outgoing president of Uber India and South Asia, as its first managing director for India, joining in September and reporting to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's managing director for Asia Pacific.</cite> <cite index="21-2">Singh, who spent nearly 11 years at Uber before joining as head of strategy in August 2015 and becoming president in June 2020, is a McKinsey alumnus and holds degrees from IIT Kharagpur and IIM Ahmedabad.</cite>

<cite index="23-2,24-2">Singh will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, strategic partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations in India, where OpenAI has identified itself as having its second-largest market after the United States.</cite> <cite index="21-5">Sam Altman said India has 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, with 18- to 24-year-olds accounting for nearly half of all messages from the country.</cite>

<cite index="21-5">OpenAI has struck partnerships spanning higher education, enterprise payments with Pine Labs, web streaming with Reliance's JioHotStar, and data centre capacity with Tata Group.</cite> <cite index="21-4,21-5">The appointment signals that OpenAI takes the risk of being seen as a foreign dependency seriously, as rival Anthropic opened its Bengaluru office late 2025 with former Microsoft India MD Irina Ghose, while Google, Amazon, and domestic contenders like Sarvam are all competing for developers and enterprise customers.</cite>

For platform builders and enterprise architects in India, Singh's hire amplifies OpenAI's commitment to local market execution. His deep operating background at Uber—navigating regulatory complexity, scaling across 20+ cities, managing government relations—positions him to handle India's unique stack: regulatory scrutiny, payment integration, localization, and political risk. Expect faster go-to-market, deeper partnerships, and localized products tailored to India's 100M+ ChatGPT user base.