Kiran Mani Joins OpenAI, Will Lead APAC From Singapore

Mani will join as Managing Director for Asia-Pacific in June, relocating to Singapore and reporting to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon, a newly created role as OpenAI accelerates its expansion across India, Japan, South Korea, Southeast Asia, and Australia.

OpenAI has appointed Kiran Mani, CEO of JioStar’s digital division, as Managing Director for Asia-Pacific. Mani will join in June 2026, based out of OpenAI’s Singapore office, and will report to Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon. The appointment was confirmed by an OpenAI spokesperson and announced internally at JioStar by Vice Chairman Uday Shankar. No successor has been named at JioStar.

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The role is newly created, reflecting OpenAI’s accelerating regional expansion. Over the past two years, the company has opened offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Australia, South Korea, and India. Asia-Pacific, and India in particular, has been identified as a priority geography as OpenAI competes with Anthropic and Google to scale generative AI adoption beyond the US and Europe. Mani’s mandate will cover business strategy, enterprise partnerships, and go-to-market execution across the region.

Mani brings over 25 years of experience in technology and digital media. At JioStar, he served as CEO–Digital and led the launch of JioHotstar, playing a central role in the merger of Viacom18 and Star India, a joint venture between Reliance Industries and Walt Disney, which created one of India’s largest streaming platforms with over 300 million subscribers. Before JioStar, he spent more than 13 years at Google, where he served as General Manager for Android and Google Play across Asia-Pacific and Japan, and has previously held roles at Microsoft and IBM.

The hire signals a shift in profile for OpenAI’s regional leadership, Mani’s background is in consumer internet scale and platform growth rather than enterprise software, which reflects the breadth of OpenAI’s ambitions in the region. India is currently OpenAI’s second-largest market globally by user base, making the APAC appointment particularly significant for the company’s next phase of growth.

Sources: Bloomberg (March 25, 2026); Business Standard; Exchange4media; BusinessToday. Appointment confirmed by OpenAI spokesperson.

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