Quick facts: What’s happening
- Who is the new head of WhatsApp? Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of CRED.
- Who is he replacing? Will Cathcart, who led WhatsApp since 2019.
- Why is Cathcart leaving? He said WhatsApp is in its “strongest position ever” and called it “the right moment to step back.”
- What is Will Cathcart doing next? He will stay at Meta building new products from the ground up.
- Is Meta buying CRED? No. Meta is making a minority investment in CRED. Shah confirmed no member data will be shared with Meta.
- Who is running CRED now? Miten Sampat, CRED’s head of strategy and finance, has been named interim CEO.
Meta has named Kunal Shah, founder and CEO of CRED, as the new head of WhatsApp. The move shows Meta is looking to WhatsApp’s future in its biggest market.
Shah takes over from Will Cathcart, who led WhatsApp since 2019 and helped grow it to over 3 billion users. Cathcart will stay at Meta to work on new products and will help Shah during the transition.
Meta picked an outsider with no previous experience at the company to run WhatsApp, its second-largest platform. Shah has built his entire career in India, which is WhatsApp’s biggest market with over 500 million users.
ALSO READ: New Galaxy S27 Pro Leak Suggests It Will Feature a Privacy Display
Why Kunal Shah
Shah stands out as one of India’s top technology founders and angel investors, with stakes in more than 250 startups. He started CRED with $1 million of his own money and grew it into a platform with 17 million monthly active users, a full set of regulatory licenses, and about $325 million in annual revenue from payments, lending, insurance, commerce, wealth, and credit cards.
Before CRED, Shah founded FreeCharge and helped kickstart online payments in India. He also chaired the Internet and Mobile Association of India and advised Peak XV (formerly Sequoia Capital India) and Pine Labs.
Meta Chief Product Officer Chris Cox approached Shah directly. In a statement, Mark Zuckerberg framed the hire around Shah’s “builder mentality and global perspective.” Cox called him “one of India’s most respected entrepreneurs and a prolific voice for how the apps we build make a positive difference in people’s lives.”
What Shah said about taking the role
Shah announced the move in a detailed thread on X, laying out CRED’s trajectory from its founding to its first profitable quarter in 2026. He then addressed WhatsApp directly:
"While it's come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive. I look forward to working with Mark, Chris, and the leadership across Meta for the next step in WhatsApp's journey."
India is the key to this decision
India is WhatsApp’s biggest market, with more than 500 million users. It’s also where WhatsApp has pushed furthest into business messaging and payments, its two main non-messaging bets.
WhatsApp Pay runs in India. WhatsApp Business is part of daily life for millions of small merchants who use it to talk to customers. Shah has built his career on creating financial products that fit into everyday habits. At CRED, he saw that paying a credit card bill, a simple act based on trust, could open the door to a full financial platform. With WhatsApp, messaging is the routine. The big question is what else can be built on top of it without losing the trust that encryption brings.
ALSO READ: Instagram Adds Individual Carousel Captions and Image Comments: Here’s How They Work
The Cathcart era: what he built and defended
Will Cathcart focused on growing WhatsApp, finding ways to make money, and defending user privacy.
Cathcart took over WhatsApp in 2019 and grew it to more than 3 billion users, including over 100 million in the US. He led WhatsApp as it moved beyond one-to-one chats, adding Communities for groups and Channels for broadcast-style updates. He also brought in private AI features that let people use generative tools in chats while keeping end-to-end encryption.
Cathcart became WhatsApp’s main public defender of encryption. He pushed back against governments like the UK and India when they tried to get backdoors into private messages. He led the legal fight against NSO Group, the Israeli spyware company, and won. That win set a precedent that holds spyware companies responsible if they target users on encrypted platforms.
In his departure note, posted on Threads and X, Cathcart wrote:
"WhatsApp is in the strongest position it's ever been. That felt like the right moment to step back. I'm very excited to see what Kunal and our amazing team continue to build."
The CRED-Meta relationship, explained
Shah’s announcement included a detail likely to draw attention from regulators and users. Meta is making a minority investment in CRED as part of a funding round that raised $900 million in primary and secondary capital.
Shah addressed the datShah tackled the data-sharing concern head-on in his thread, saying the investment gives Meta no access to member data. The firewall is clear, but having a Meta-owned messaging giant and a Meta-backed fintech in India will almost certainly raise questions from privacy advocates and regulators.s Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance at the company since 2020. Shah described him as someone who has been “suffering me” for five years, a signal of operational continuity.
What happens next
Shah now leads a platform with more users than any other messaging app, strong encryption, and several revenue streams that Cathcart turned into multi-billion-dollar businesses. Shah says his job is not just to keep things running. He wants to close the gap between what WhatsApp is today and what it could be.
Some questions remain: Where will Shah be based? How will the WhatsApp team change under an outside hire? Will his fintech experience speed up WhatsApp’s business plans outside India? We do not have answers yet. But WhatsApp is clearly moving toward becoming a platform, not just a utility.
You can follow Smartprix on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Google News. Visit smartprix.com for the latest tech and auto news, reviews, and guides.
