Will Cathcart had run WhatsApp for seven years when he decided to move on. Meta’s search for a successor ended in Bengaluru, with the founder of a credit card payments app.
On Monday, Meta Platforms announced that Kunal Shah, who started Cred, will become WhatsApp’s next leader. In the same announcement it said it would invest $900 million in Cred. Business Standard reported that the money buys Meta a minority stake of 20 per cent and puts Cred’s post-money valuation at $4.5 billion, or around ₹43,239 crore.
Cathcart will stay at Meta to build new products.
What Meta said
Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook that Shah “built Cred into one of India’s most important technology companies” and brings “the kind of builder mentality and global perspective” needed to run the world’s biggest messaging app.
Chris Cox, Meta’s chief product officer, was more specific in an internal message that Business Standard saw. Once Cathcart signalled his plans, Cox wrote, Meta looked for someone with “an intuitive grasp” of WhatsApp’s global product opportunity, who could handle the disruption expected from artificial intelligence. “Kunal became the clear choice,” he said. Cox called Shah “one of India’s most respected entrepreneurs.”
Shah posted his own note on X. “While it’s come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive,” he wrote. He also thanked Cathcart for “scaling something the world relies on quietly.”
The man and his company
Shah studied philosophy. He first built FreeCharge, a digital payments and promotions company, and then founded Cred in 2018. Cred sells itself to affluent consumers and now counts 17 million monthly active users. Business Standard said it processes more than 40 per cent of India’s credit card bill payments, and that its lending arm manages ₹24,000 crore in assets for financial institutions.
Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance at Cred since 2020, takes over as interim chief executive with immediate effect. Shah keeps his shareholding. The Series H round, part primary and part secondary, may be Cred’s last private raise before a public listing, Business Standard wrote. Globalbrands Magazine noted that the valuation compares with $3.6 billion in May 2025 and a peak of $6.4 billion in 2022.
Why India
India is WhatsApp’s biggest market. Meta is estimated to have close to 500 million users there, though it does not publish country figures. WhatsApp Pay arrived in 2020 on the UPI network, but regulators held back its rollout, and by May 2026 it ranked ninth by UPI market share.
A person familiar with the matter told Business Standard that India is one of WhatsApp’s largest engagement markets, so Meta wanted someone who understands Indian consumer behaviour.
The same publication reported that Shah will join Meta’s global leadership team and relocate from Bengaluru to Menlo Park, California.
Globalbrands Magazine cautioned that running an app at WhatsApp’s scale is a different job from building a members-only fintech club. Shah will have to weigh growth against the privacy and simplicity users prize. Push too hard on commerce, it said, and the app gets cluttered.
Sources
- Kunal Shah to Lead WhatsApp as Meta Bets on India
- Meta invests $900 mn in Cred, Kunal Shah to head WhatsApp globally
