BANGALORE, India (Diya TV) — Meta Platforms announced Monday it has appointed Kunal Shah, founder of Indian fintech company CRED, as the new global head of WhatsApp, pairing the leadership transition with a $900 million investment in his Bengaluru-based startup.
The $900 million financing round is structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases, making Meta a minority investor in CRED. The investment gives Meta a roughly 20% stake in CRED, which operates an app that rewards customers for paying their credit card bills on time, and values the company at $4.5 billion post-money.
Shah will succeed Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after nearly seven years at the helm of WhatsApp to take on a new product-building role at the company. Shah will step down as chief executive of CRED while retaining his personal shareholding. To oversee day-to-day operations at CRED, the company appointed Miten Sampat, its head of strategy and finance since 2020, as interim chief executive.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a post: “Kunal Shah will join Meta as WhatsApp’s next leader. Kunal built CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world’s biggest messaging app.”
Shah responded on X, saying: “While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp’s journey.”
India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users accounting for a significant share of the app’s global base of over 3 billion people. The country has also emerged as a key battleground for Meta’s ambitions in business messaging and digital payments, areas seen as critical to WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.
Meta’s stake in CRED comes at a time when WhatsApp Pay continues to seek scale in India’s Unified Payments Interface market, where it ranked ninth by market share as of May 2026. WhatsApp entered India’s payments segment in 2020 with a UPI-based offering but faced onboarding restrictions as regulators sought to prevent the messaging platform from gaining excessive dominance in digital payments.
Shah founded CRED in 2018 after his earlier success with FreeCharge, a digital payments and mobile recharge platform he co-founded in 2010 that was acquired by Snapdeal in 2015 for roughly $400 million. CRED now offers products spanning payments, lending, insurance, wealth management, and lifestyle services, with 17 million monthly active users. The Series H round is expected to support CRED’s next phase of expansion and could potentially be its final private funding round before a public listing.
Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, in an internal message to employees, said that after Cathcart indicated his plans to move on, Meta searched for a leader who had “an intuitive grasp” of WhatsApp’s global product opportunity, could navigate the disruption expected from artificial intelligence, and had the ability to lead the world’s largest communication platform. “Kunal became the clear choice,” Cox said.
