How Perplexity won India: the Airtel playbook for AI startups

Why launching AI in India is hard

India is one of the biggest markets in the world for AI apps by users, and one of the hardest by revenue. Most people pay for very little software, and a monthly fee in dollars feels high. On top of that, the biggest players are already there. In the second quarter of 2025, ChatGPT had about 19.8 million monthly users in India, according to Appfigures data reported by TechCrunch.

So a new AI product has to answer two questions at once. Why should anyone try it, and why should they pay for it? Ads and launch videos can make people aware of a product. They cannot remove the price objection or put the app on a phone.

What Perplexity did

In July 2025 Perplexity signed a deal with Bharti Airtel. Every one of Airtel's more than 360 million customers could claim twelve months of Perplexity Pro for free. Pro normally costs about $200 a year. The deal was exclusive, so no other telecom company in India could offer it.

The deal answered both questions together. The price objection disappeared for a year, and the offer arrived inside an app and a brand people already trusted with their phone bill. Customers switched it on from inside the Airtel Thanks app they already used. Perplexity also signed with Paytm, which put it inside another app with hundreds of millions of downloads.

It helped that the founder was part of the story. CEO Aravind Srinivas grew up in Chennai and studied at IIT Madras, and he was visible in Indian media all through the launch. A local founder story gave the press a reason to keep covering it.

What happened next

Perplexity recorded 5.9 million app downloads in India in July 2025, up 625% on the month before. Over the seven months the offer was open to new users, it got about 56 million downloads, more than nine times the previous seven months. Monthly users in India went from about 2.6 million in the first half of 2025 to 8.9 million in July and about 22 million in October.

The honest part comes later. New redemptions closed in January 2026, and downloads fell sharply. By July 2026 monthly users had dropped to about 14 million. That is still more than five times where Perplexity started. In-app purchase revenue kept rising even as downloads fell, which suggests a share of the free users turned into paying ones.

Five lessons for AI startups launching in India

1. Borrow a distribution base people already trust. Telcos, banks, payment apps and large employers already have the customer, the trust and the billing. One partner can do what years of ads cannot.
2. Remove the price objection completely. A discount still asks for a decision. A year free asks for nothing, and gives the product time to become a habit.
3. Make the partnership exclusive. Exclusivity turned a promotion into a moat in Airtel's market.
4. Measure who stays, not who downloads. Fifty-six million downloads became fourteen million monthly users. Plan the product and the follow-up content for the people who stay.
5. Give India a local story. A founder with roots here, Indian use cases and Indian languages turn a foreign app into one people talk about at home.

Where content fits

A distribution deal gets the app onto the phone. Content decides whether people open it a second time. The users who stayed after the free year were the ones who found a real use for the product in their own lives. For an AI startup launching here, the launch film and the first months of content should show those uses with Indian people, in Indian settings, solving Indian problems. That is the part a partner cannot do for you.