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Perplexity: Partnership
Perplexity's yearlong free subscription partnership with Airtel (360M customers) drove 56M downloads in India over 7 months (July 2025-Jan 2026). Early data shows free-to-paid conversion and sustained revenue growth as promotions expire, validating freemium-to-paid model in price-sensitive markets.
Source: AI Insider
- What happened
- Perplexity's yearlong free subscription partnership with Airtel (360M customers) drove 56M downloads in India over 7 months (July 2025-Jan 2026). Early data shows free-to-paid conversion and sustained revenue growth as promotions expire, validating freemium-to-paid model in price-sensitive markets.
- Who
- Perplexity · India
- When
- 2026-08-18
- Source
- AI Insider
- So what
- Alliances broaden the commercial surface, and the leadership need follows.
The leadership read
Alliances broaden the commercial surface, and the leadership need follows. Perplexity's partnership in the sector widens demand for commercial and alliance leaders who turn an agreement into realised value. Across Asia, watch whether dedicated senior ownership is put on it; unowned alliances quietly lapse.
Market context: Against a Talent Market Index of 122.7 (Hot) (up 17.8 month-on-month), Asia is at rising (+8.2pts) on signal share.
Perplexity: 4 signals in the last 90 days; 0.3% of MitchelLake's Oceania signal flow; 8 tracked across 122 days.
MitchelLake in this thematic
Also at Perplexity →
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HistoIndex →HistoIndex, an AI-driven digital pathology company for fibrotic diseases, signed an MoU with Singapore's A*STAR to collaborate on early-stage development of pipeline therapies for fibrotic diseases.
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SUPCON Technology →SUPCON, a Hangzhou industrial automation and AI company, signed a strategic cooperation agreement with Alibaba Cloud to deploy the QwenWork enterprise agent, starting with its marketing chain and planning rollout to procurement, supply chain, finance, HR, R&D and compliance.
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Sendbird →Sendbird signed an MOU with Korean LLM developer Upstage to pair Sendbird's Delight.ai enterprise AI agent platform with Upstage's Solar LLM for enterprise deployment and joint sovereign-AI opportunities. Joint testing has run since August, with the collaboration now moving to formal validation.
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Atmovie Global Track →Japanese film accelerator Atmovie Global Track is formalizing a partnership with Europe-based film workshop Ties That Bind, with an Asia-Europe co-production panel at TIFFCOM Tokyo on Oct. 30.
Where this lands in our work
- Cross Border Expansion Executive Search →
Partnerships are usually the first structure a company builds before it hires locally.
- Private Equity →
Listed and PE-backed boards renew leadership against a value-creation clock.
- Executive Search: Asia →
Our Asia practice runs the searches behind signals like this one.
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