OpenAI Hires CEO of India’s JioStar to Head Up Asia-Pacific - Bloomberg.com
OpenAI has hired Kiran Mani, the executive who helped build India into the world's largest streaming market, to run its Asia Pacific business — the clearest signal yet that the lab is done treating the region as a backwater.
Mani, who steps down as CEO of digital at JioStar this month, will join OpenAI in June as Managing Director for Asia Pacific, a newly created role based in Singapore, the company confirmed. He reports to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon.
The hire is notable because it's not a research appointment. OpenAI has had a growing footprint across the region since opening its Tokyo office in April 2024 — it now has people on the ground in Singapore, Australia, Korea, and India — but this is its first dedicated regional commercial leader. That suggests the lab, which has watched India generate roughly 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users and Japan emerge as its largest enterprise market outside the United States, wants someone who knows how to build distribution and revenue, not just awareness.
Mani fits that description more precisely than almost anyone in the region's tech industry. At JioStar, the $8.5 billion Reliance-Disney joint venture formed in late 2024, he oversaw the integration of Disney+ Hotstar and JioCinema into a single platform — JioHotstar — launched in February 2025, and then ran the combined operation's digital business. Before that, he spent years at Google as Managing Director for Android and Google Play across Asia Pacific, a role that was essentially about getting mobile software into hundreds of millions of hands across highly diverse markets. He also held senior roles at Microsoft earlier in his career.
India is the sharpest illustration of why OpenAI wants him. Sam Altman said at the India AI Impact Summit that the country accounts for around 100 million weekly active ChatGPT users, making it OpenAI's second-largest market globally after the United States. Japan leads for business users. India also leads for Codex adoption, according to people familiar with internal metrics. Those numbers have attracted attention inside the lab, but turning usage into revenue in markets where price sensitivity is high and enterprise sales infrastructure has historically been thin requires a different skill set than the one most frontier AI labs have cultivated.
The commercial pressures are real. OpenAI has been building out go-to-market capacity across the region, and international growth is part of the financial picture the lab needs to show as it moves toward an IPO. Having a regional leader who understands both platform dynamics at consumer scale and the enterprise sales cycle in complex Asian markets is a specific bet.
Mani's background at Google and Microsoft, combined with his JioStar tenure, makes him an unusual profile for a research lab. He has spent more than two decades in roles focused on platform growth, digital media, and market expansion — exactly the kind of work that's adjacent to but not the same as AI research. Whether that gap matters will depend on how much latitude OpenAI gives him to build a commercial operation independently from the product side.
OpenAI declined to comment beyond confirming the hire.