BENGALURU: Payments company Razorpay has deepened its partnership with OpenAI to help Indian brands advertise on ChatGPT, Inc42 reported on October 5. Brands will use Razorpay Engage, the company's growth marketing platform, to prepare their product catalogues and to create and manage campaigns on ChatGPT Ads.
Among the brands already onboarded are jeweller Tanishq, watch and eyewear brand Fastrack, haircare company Traya, the Tata group's shopping app Tata Neu, matrimony site Shaadi.com, insurer Axis Max Life, jewellery brand Palmonas and the education institution NMIMS.
What Razorpay Engage does
The platform will check whether a merchant's catalogue is ready for ChatGPT and help optimise it, create and manage campaigns on ChatGPT Ads, and measure and improve their performance. AI agents will help adjust campaigns, with people overseeing the changes, Inc42 reported.
"The way people discover products is changing. The next customer may not search for a product or scroll through an ad; they may simply ask an AI assistant," said Rahul Kothari, Razorpay's chief operating officer.
ChatGPT Ads in India
OpenAI launched ChatGPT Ads in India at the end of August, Business Today reported on August 27. Logged-in users on the Free and Go tiers, Go costing ₹399 a month, see sponsored ads at the bottom of responses, labelled and visually separated from ChatGPT's answers, while Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Education users remain ad-free. More than 50 brands were expected to launch in the first week, self-serve buying through the ChatGPT Ads Manager opened on September 4 with a minimum daily budget of ₹725, and WPP and Omnicom are OpenAI's agency partners.
India is ChatGPT's second-largest market, with more than 100 million weekly users. Advertisers cannot see chat histories, personal information or memories and receive only aggregate data such as impressions and clicks, and ads are not shown to minors or next to sensitive topics such as health, mental health and politics, the report said.
From paying inside ChatGPT to advertising there
The advertising deal builds on an earlier project. On October 9, 2025, Razorpay, the National Payments Corporation of India and OpenAI announced a pilot of "Agentic Payments" on ChatGPT, which lets users complete UPI purchases without leaving the chat.
The pilot runs through Razorpay's banking partners, Axis Bank and Airtel Payments Bank, and uses UPI features such as UPI Circle and UPI Reserve Pay. Grocery app BigBasket was among the first merchants. In the example the companies gave, a user asks ChatGPT to "help me order ingredients for a Thai-style vegetable curry for 4 people from BigBasket"; the assistant checks the catalogue, offers options and, with one confirmation, places the order through Razorpay. Users keep control through real-time tracking and the ability to revoke permissions instantly, the companies said.
At the time, Razorpay's chief executive Harshil Mathur said the aim was to turn "AI assistants from simple discovery tools into full-fledged shopping agents". Oliver Jay, OpenAI's managing director of international strategy, said AI was "evolving from helping people find products to actually helping them buy them, while also helping sellers reach millions of people". The 2025 announcement said UPI powers more than 20 billion transactions a month.
From discovery to checkout
The two steps together cover the full path from discovery to purchase inside a chat: a brand's products can be found through advertising and catalogue listings, and paid for with UPI without leaving the conversation. The companies said they would explore extending such AI-based payments to more kinds of commerce, including, in future, agents that complete transactions on a user's behalf "in a safe, secure, and user-controlled manner".
For Razorpay, the deal comes as it prepares to go public. The company filed for an IPO of $500 million to $700 million in June, at a target valuation of $5 billion to $6 billion, according to Inc42's IPO tracker.
Neither company disclosed the financial terms of the advertising partnership or how many brands will take part beyond the first group.
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