Airtel to offer free 1-year Perplexity Pro subscription to its customers

Airtel to offer free 1-year Perplexity Pro subscription to its customers

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26 Aug, 2025 12:21

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Artificial intelligence (AI)-powered answer engine Perplexity is offering a one-year free subscription to its premium tier, Perplexity Pro, to customers of Bharti Airtel, India's second-largest telecom operator.

The offer will be available to all 360 million prepaid and postpaid mobile customers, and broadband customers of Airtel.

This marks the company’s first partnership with a telecom operator in India, as part of its efforts to drive adoption in the world’s second-largest internet market. Perplexity has struck similar deals with firms such as SoftBank and T-Mobile over the past year.

Airtel customers can avail this subscription through the rewards section of its Airtel Thanks app until January 17, 2026. Perplexity charges $20 (approximately Rs 1,731) per month for its premium subscription service across most of the world, including India.

Airtel noted that the subscription would not auto-renew. Users will have to upgrade to a paid plan through Perplexity, else their account will automatically switch to the free version. One also has to be an active Airtel customer for the full 12-month period.

"This collaboration will bring the powerful and real-time knowledge tool for millions of users at their fingertips, at no extra cost. This first of its kind Gen-AI partnership in India is focused on helping our customers navigate the emerging trends in the digital world with confidence and ease," said Gopal Vittal, Vice Chairman & Managing Director, Bharti Airtel in a statement.

Perplexity co-founder Aravind Srinivas said “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.”

Interestingly, this move comes on the heels of rival Google offering a one-year free subscription to its premium AI tools to college students in India. This includes access to the company's flagship AI model, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini’s Deep Research feature, AI video generator Veo 3, and higher usage limits in NotebookLM.

Perplexity, which seeks to disrupt Google’s flagship search engine, has seen growing adoption of its service in India in recent years. In April, Srinivas told Moneycontrol that India is among the company’s top 10 countries by revenue and top four markets by daily traffic.

At the time, Srinivas had said he was pleasantly surprised by the willingness of people in India to pay for the product despite an expensive price point.

"A lot of people are using the deep research agent that we have, our pro search is being used by a lot of people too. In terms of daily query traffic too, it (India) is in the top five or top four (market) for us. So, it's a pretty important market" he said.

Srinivas had also stated plans of rolling out a lower India-specific pricing for Perplexity Pro to grow its subscriber base in the country.

The service has also been focusing on incorporating local content, including cricket-related content, to attract more people to its answer engine. Earlier this year, it launched a dedicated IPL page where users can track league standings, match schedules, and the latest news.

"There are lots of searches on cricket that are already happening with Perplexity, and we want to keep growing that. We also plan to incorporate other content that's interesting to Indian audiences like entertainment, TV shows, movies, local results, and better support for local language content," Srinivas said in April.

Perplexity also partnered with digital payments giant Paytm in February to integrate its AI answer engine into the payments app.

Founded in 2022 by Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, Perplexity was last valued at $9 billion when it raised $500 million funding led by Institutional Venture Partners.

The startup, which counts Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos among its backers, is said to be in advanced talks to raise fresh funds at a $14 billion valuation.