AI startup Perplexity has formed a partnership with India's Bharti Airtel to provide 12-month Perplexity Pro subscription free of cost to all its 360 million customers.

This marks Perplexity’s first partnership with an Indian telecom company, Bharti Airtel said in a statement.

The partnership marks Perplexity's intent to expand its user base in the most populous country where the adoption of AI search and chat tools like Perplexity, OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude and xAI's Grok is rising at a frenetic pace.

"This collaboration will bring the powerful and real-time knowledge tool for millions of users at their fingertips, at no extra cost," said Gopal Vittal, vice chairman & managing director, Bharti Airtel.

Perplexity Pro is priced globally at around Rs 17,000 for a year.

"This partnership is an exciting way to make accurate, trustworthy, and professional-grade AI accessible to more people in India -- whether a student, working professional, or managing a household. With Perplexity Pro, users get a smarter, easier way to find information, learn, and get more done," said Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO, Perplexity.

Perplexity Pro includes more daily Pro searches per user, access to advanced AI models including even GPT 4.1 and Claude.

Earlier this year, Perplexity also established a partnership with Indian fintech major Paytm, enabling users to access its AI-powered search functionality directly within the Paytm platform.

In January, the company announced intentions to recruit an Indian executive for local operations, though these plans were temporarily suspended due to an unexpectedly high volume of applications. The company also committed to investing $1 million and dedicating five hours weekly to supporting AI development initiatives in India.