Meta names Indian fintech founder Kunal Shah as WhatsApp CEO

Meta has appointed Indian entrepreneur Kunal Shah, 47, as the new chief executive of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart, who is moving to another role in the company. Shah is a longtime fintech founder and serial entrepreneur, best known as the founder of CRED, a payments and financial management app backed by investors including Tiger Global and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund.

The move fits Mark Zuckerberg’s broader pattern of bringing in external founders, sometimes after Meta has invested in their companies. In Shah’s case, Meta invested $900 million in CRED at a $4.5 billion valuation. The choice also appears tied to WhatsApp’s scale in India, its largest market, where the app has more than 500 million users.

Zuckerberg said in the announcement that Shah had made CRED “one of India’s most important technology companies” and brought the “builder mentality and global perspective” needed to run the world’s biggest messaging app. Shah has described leadership as “providing certainty in times of uncertainty” and says empathy is essential for managers who want to change consumer behavior or lead teams through change.

Shah’s path to the top began in Mumbai, where he started working at 14 after his father’s business failed. He took on odd jobs including deliveries, data entry, selling henna cones, pirated CDs and tutoring, later earning a philosophy degree from Wilson College and briefly enrolling in an MBA before dropping out. His breakthrough came in 2010 with FreeCharge, a mobile recharge and payments platform sold in 2015 to Snapdeal for $400 million. He later became an angel investor and adviser to Y Combinator and Sequoia Capital, launched CRED in 2018, and grew it to 17 million monthly active users while expanding into lending, insurance, commerce and wealth management.