• by Colin Kirkland , 10 hours ago

WhatsApp's new leader will be Kunal Shah, the Indian entrepreneur and founder of Cred, a fintech startup that Meta has decided to invest $900 million into during a recent financing round.

Per the arrangement, Shah will step down as the CEO of Cred -- an 8-year-old company that operates a platform for credit-card bill payments, money lending, and other payment services -- but will retain his personal shares.

Moving WhatsApp’s leadership to India marks a strategic move by Meta to focus on the platform’s largest market.

Currently, over 500 million of WhatsApp’s 3 billion total users live in India. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg hopes Shah can help construct WhatsApp's next phase of growth.

According to Zuckerberg's recent Facebook post, the CEO feels that Shah “brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective” it will require to run WhatsApp.

“While it's come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive,” Shah added in a post on X, noting that despite its 20% stake in Cred, Meta will not have any access to the startup’s member data.

Investing almost $1 billion in Cred, however, aligns Meta with a successful international digital payments provider and could impact the future of WhatsApp’s limited “Pay” offering, which originally launched in India in 2018 and Brazil two years later.

Shah is replacing Will Cathcart, who led WhatsApp for the past seven years and oversaw the onboarding of over 100 million U.S. users and 3 billion global users.