Synopsis
OpenAI personnel are spending more time in India to understand the ecosystem and offer products and services that fit the market. Their concentration on India comes at a time when the coding war is heating up and OpenAI is trying to expand its enterprise and developer-focused offerings globally, people aware of the developments said.Listen to this article in summarized format
OpenAI personnel are spending more time in India to understand the ecosystem and offer products and services that fit the market. Their concentration on India comes at a time when the coding war is heating up and OpenAI is trying to expand its enterprise and developer-focused offerings globally, people aware of the developments said.
Singapore-based Thomas Jeng, APAC head of startups, and Sun Weiran, solutions architect, were in India in March. In April, Codex developer experience engineers Gabriel Chua and Vaibhav Srivastav were in Bengaluru for a hackathon.
The firm has hired Harshit M, who is looking at go-to-market (GTM) for startups, India, and a few others to work with developers. In addition, it is ramping up its startups team across its GTM, Applied AI, and AI deployment engineering roles, according to the job postings.
The company faces tough competition from Anthropic’s Claude platform that is more enterprise centric.
India, with its 27 million developers and rising AI adoption, is a fast-growing market and a key focus for OpenAI.
Codex and India
While the company did not share numbers, in a report it said since the launch of the Codex app, India has seen 4X growth two weeks after the launch in February. The company had 4 million weekly active users.
Vaibhav Srivastav, developer experience engineer, had said in April that globally Codex currently has three the company is now expanding to Windows, which is extensively used in the Indian market. “We are pushing out features that allow us to get a better developer market fit within India,” he said.
Codex’s Gabriel Chua said the platform is being used for serious engineering tasks, adding they will spend more time with developers in India.
The company is investing in India’s developer ecosystem through community ambassadors and has held multiple meetups and hackathons across India, he said.
OpenAI is also partnering with investors such as Lightspeed, Accel, Elevation Capital, and Antler in India to engage with developer communities, offering them credits, early access to its frontier models, and technical support, as ET reported earlier.
The company faces stiff competition from Anthropic.
Startup Landscape
For companies such as OpenAI, startups are a key focus area.
India is an attractive market for OpenAI given the huge developer community in the country and rising spend on developer tools, a Bengaluru-based startup founder said.
“This is replicating the SaaS playbook, where they are partnering with organisations and getting the right mindshare by borrowing the trust of the distribution partners,” he said on the condition of anonymity, citing his working relationship with the OpenAI team.
According to an online survey in February by the VC firm Activate AI based on 244 developers and builders in India, Claude Code is leading the pack with 42% of the developers surveyed using the platform, while OpenAI’s Codex is used by 7% of the developers. Pratyush Choudhury, co-founder and general partner of the early stage AI investment firm Activate AI said this is now changing.
Activate’s Choudhury pointed out that Claude Code was clearly ahead earlier this year, but over time the workflows became more intensive and practical constraints around latency, availability, and rate limits started to matter. Meanwhile, OpenAI has closed much of the capability gap with Codex, stronger model releases like GPT-5.4 and GPT-5.5, and high-quality computer-use capabilities. Computer use is a Codex feature that allows AI to click, type and move the mouse, going beyond writing code.
While Codex is closing the performance gap for now, founders flag that it is unclear how this will play out.
Challenges
Sidu Ponnappa, co-founder, Realfast.ai, pointed out that while Codex is performing well, the frontier labs are releasing newer capabilities every quarter. One of the founders cited earlier concurred and said that in the era of AI, there is no concept of loyalty and people will switch if they find better models.
