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

The move comes alongside a Meta-led $900 million financing for Indian fintech giant CRED, structured through a combination of primary and secondary share purchases. The deal will make Meta a minority investor in the CRED, which said Shah will step down as chief executive while retaining his personal shareholding.

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

Cathcart, who has led WhatsApp since 2019, oversaw a period of rapid expansion that helped the service become one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, including with more than 100 million users in the United States. Under his leadership, WhatsApp expanded beyond private messaging with the launch of products such as Communities, Channels, and AI integrations, while deepening its focus on business messaging.

But efforts by WhatsApp to push into digital payments have delivered mixed results. While WhatsApp Pay gained traction in India, the service struggled to replicate the scale and engagement achieved by local rivals such as PhonePe and Google Pay, leaving significant 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 can help unlock WhatsApp’s next phase of growth.

In a statement, 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 the world’s largest messaging app.

The appointment comes as Meta seeks to expand WhatsApp’s business beyond messaging, particularly in areas such as payments, commerce and business communications. India, as WhatsApp’s largest market, has been central to those efforts.

In 2018, Shah founded CRED, a fintech platform with 17 million monthly active users, after earlier building FreeCharge, one of India’s early digital payments startups. Beyond his operating roles, he has become one of India’s most prominent startup 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 about $4.5 billion on a post-money basis. The startup was last valued at about $3.6 billion in a funding round in May 2025, below its peak valuation of $6.4 billion in 2022. Before its Series F round, the company had raised more than $1 billion from investors.

As part of the transition, Miten Sampat, who has overseen strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, will take over as interim chief executive with immediate effect. Shah will retain his shareholding in the company after stepping away from day-to-day operations.

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