Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnAshwin Manikandan, Jaspreet Kalra and Haripriya SureshThu, June 25, 2026 at 10:58 AM GMT+2 4 min readBy Ashwin Manikandan, Jaspreet Kalra and Haripriya SureshMUMBAI, June 25 (Reuters) - Kunal Shah, an Indian fintech founder with no engineering degree or Silicon Valley pedigree, has spent two decades building businesses around digital payments and consumer behaviour in India.He now takes charge of Meta's WhatsApp as the company looks to leverage the reach of the world's largest messaging platform and build a "superapp" to capture a bigger share of surging online payments, industry players say.Meta was looking for a leader with "an intuitive grasp of the immense, global product potential for WhatsApp", Chief Product Officer Chris Cox wrote in an internal memo announcing 47-year-old Shah's appointment on Monday."Over the course of the (now many) conversations I've had with Kunal through this courting process, he has shown an immense entrepreneurial energy combined with a natural humanism," Cox said in the note reviewed by Reuters.Shah's appointment comes alongside Meta's $900 million investment in his fintech venture CRED, a Bengaluru-based credit card management company backed by Peak XV and Tiger Global. Shah will keep his CRED stake of about 20% but step back from an executive role in the firm."Kunal built CRED into one of India's most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world's biggest messaging app," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's founder, chair and CEO, said in a statement.Shah declined to comment.Industry executives say the move reflects Meta's ambitions to deepen commerce and financial services offerings across emerging markets such as India, Brazil and Indonesia. India is WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 500 million users."If you look at where WhatsApp is right now, they are in a league of their own as far as messaging is concerned, and it remains an excellent tool for small businesses to discover commerce, but the leg which is broken is payments," said Siddarth Pai, founding partner at venture capital firm 3one4 Capital.Shah's experience developing consumer-facing payments products from scratch in India makes him a logical choice, Pai added.PHILOSOPHY STUDENT TO ENTREPRENEURBorn in the western city of Ahmedabad and raised in Mumbai, Shah began working as a teenager after his family ran into financial difficulties, he has said.Unlike the Indian tech executives who are engineering graduates, Shah studied philosophy at Mumbai's Wilson College and later dropped out of a management course at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info