While OpenAI has established its lead in the U.S., Perplexity seems to be looking towards India. This week, the search-focused startup struck a deal with Bharati Airtel, India’s second-largest telecom operator, to offer a free 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription to all of Airtel’s 360 million customers.
Airtel stated that this deal is exclusive, which means that no other telecom company can offer Perplexity’s services including free access to their subscribers.
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Gopal Vittal, vice chairman at Bharti Airtel, stated, “This collaboration will bring the powerful and real-time knowledge tool for millions of users at their fingertips, at no extra cost. This first of its kind GenAI partnership in India is focused on helping our customers navigate the emerging trends in the digital world with confidence and ease.” Meanwhile, Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity said, the partnership provides an “exciting way to make accurate, trustworthy, and professional-grade AI accessible to more people in India.”
The announcement of this news has led to a surge in downloads of this app in India, particularly on iOS. Perplexity has taken over the top spot on the App Store in India, overtaking OpenAI’s ChatGPT. However, ChatGPT remains on the top spot in Google Play Store.
Perplexity has been gaining traction in India for a while. In the second quarter, Perplexity’s downloads in India surged 600% year-over-year to 2.8 million, according to Sensor Tower data shared exclusively with TechCrunch. In comparison, OpenAI’s ChatGPT saw a 587% increase, reaching 46.7 million downloads in the same period. This growth trend extended to active users as well: Perplexity’s monthly active users (MAUs) in India increased by 640% year-over-year in Q2, while ChatGPT’s MAUs grew by 350%.
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India was also the largest market by MAUs for Perplexity in the last quarter, per Sensor Tower. However, ChatGPT maintained a significant lead in absolute numbers, with 19.8 million MAUs versus 3.7 million for Perplexity.
Earlier this year, Perplexity partnered with Indian fintech company Paytm to offer access to its AI-powered search through the Paytm app, which has over 500 million downloads and is among the top-three apps on the Indian government’s Unified Payment Interface network, processing over 1.2 billion transactions worth over ₹1,34,000 crores (approximately $15.6 billion).
In January, Srinivas announced that he plans to hire an Indian executive in the country, which he later put on hold after receiving an “overwhelming” response. He further announced a $1 million investment and a commitment of five hours a week of his time to a group building AI in India. The startup has also internally discussed offering its AI search engine to Indian students to grow its reach, according to TechCrunch.