Meta announced in June 2026 that Kunal Shah, founder of Indian fintech platform CRED, will take over as head of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after nearly seven years leading the messaging app. Cathcart will move to a new product-building role at Meta.
Alongside the leadership change, Meta led a $900 million financing round in CRED, structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. The deal values CRED at approximately $4.5 billion on a post-money basis, up from its last valuation of $3.6 billion in May 2025, though still below its peak of $6.4 billion in 2022. Meta will become a minority investor in the company. Shah will step down as CRED’s CEO but retain his personal shareholding. Miten Sampat, who has overseen strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, will serve as interim chief executive while the board works on a longer-term management structure ahead of a planned IPO.
India is central to the appointment. WhatsApp’s largest market has more than 500 million users, a significant portion of the app’s global base of over three billion. Meta has identified payments, commerce, and business messaging as key growth areas for WhatsApp, and India has been a primary focus for those efforts. WhatsApp Pay gained traction in the country, though the service has not matched the scale of local rivals PhonePe and Google Pay.
Shah founded CRED in 2018; the platform currently has 17 million monthly active users. He previously co-founded FreeCharge, one of India’s early digital payments startups, and has backed more than 250 companies as an investor. In a statement, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Shah had built CRED into “one of India’s most important technology companies” and brought the “builder mentality and global perspective” needed to run WhatsApp.
The fresh capital raised by CRED is expected to support growth across its payments, lending, insurance, and wealth businesses. Before this round, the company had raised more than $1 billion from investors.
Source: TechCrunch