WhatsApp gets new boss as Meta taps Indian CRED founder Kunal Shah, invests $900M in startup

Meta is betting on India for WhatsApp’s next chapter, naming entrepreneur Kunal Shah to lead the messaging app and succeeding Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after nearly seven years in a new product-building role at the company.

The move comes alongside Meta’s $900 million financing led by Indian fintech giant CRED, structured through a combination of primary and secondary share buybacks. The deal will make Meta a minority investor in CRED, which Shah said will step down as chief executive while retaining his shares.

India is WhatsApp’s largest market, with more than 500 million users and a significant share of the app’s global base of more than three billion people. The country has also emerged as a key battleground for Meta’s ambitions in business messaging and digital payments, areas considered key to WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.

Cathcart, who has led WhatsApp since 2019, has overseen a period of rapid growth that has helped the service become one of the most popular messaging apps in the world, including more than 100 million users in the United States. Under his leadership, WhatsApp expanded beyond private messaging with the introduction of products such as communities, channels, and AI integration, while deepening its focus on business messaging.

But WhatsApp’s efforts to get into digital payments have yielded mixed results. While WhatsApp Pay is gaining momentum in India, the service is struggling to replicate the scale and engagement achieved by local rivals such as PhonePe and Google Pay, leaving a lot of room for growth in one of the world’s largest payments markets.

Meta is betting that Shah’s experience building a consumer internet company in India could help unlock WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.

In a statement, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Shah built CRED “one of the most important technology companies in India” and brought the “innovator’s mind and global perspective” needed to run the world’s largest messaging app.

The appointment comes as Meta seeks to grow WhatsApp’s business beyond messaging, particularly in areas such as payments, commerce and business communication. India, as WhatsApp’s largest market, has been at the center of those efforts.

In 2018, Shah founded CRED, a fintech platform with 17 million active users, after building FreeCharge, one of India’s first digital payment startups. Outside of his operational role, he remains one of India’s leading investors, backing more than 250 companies and serving in advisory and industry leadership positions across the country’s technology and financial services sectors.

Meta’s investment values ​​CRED at approximately $4.5 billion on a back-end basis. The startup was last valued at $3.6 billion in a funding round in May 2025, down from a $6.4 billion peak in 2022. Prior to its Series F round, the company had raised more than $1 billion from investors.

As part of this transition, Miten Sampat, who has been overseeing strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, will take over as interim CEO immediately. Shah will retain his stake in the company after stepping back from day-to-day operations.

CRED said its board and leadership team are working on a long-term governance structure as the company prepares for an eventual public offering, with new capital expected to support growth across its payments, lending, insurance and wealth businesses.