Meta's India and Southeast Asia VP departs for OpenAI

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s vice president for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving the social media giant to join OpenAI, the company told TechCrunch. Devanathan will be based in Singapore and report to OpenAI’s Asia-Pacific managing director, Kiran Mani, overseeing consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia.

She departs Meta after more than a decade at the company, which has faced growing scrutiny over issues including online safety and content moderation. A person familiar with the matter said Devanathan was involved in the company’s decision-making process in India. Her move follows the recent hiring of Prabhjeet Singh, who spent more than a decade at Uber leading its India and South Asia business, as OpenAI’s India head. OpenAI has been expanding across Asia-Pacific, opening offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi over the past two years. Following Devanathan’s exit, Meta’s India managing director, Arun Srinivas, will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company’s vice president for Asia Pacific, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Devanathan joined Meta in 2016, holding several leadership roles including leading its Asia Pacific gaming business before being named vice president for India and Southeast Asia in June last year.

The departure comes as Meta faces growing pressure from Indian authorities. Earlier this month, the company apologized after Instagram mistakenly restricted a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July, prompting New Delhi to summon Meta executives, including chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, over the incident. The Indian government has also sought an explanation from Meta after a BBC report last month found Instagram ads that allegedly offered access to child sexual abuse material. Meta said in a blog post that it had removed the violating ads and accounts and rejected suggestions that it knowingly targeted such ads at users based on inappropriate interests, adding that it had removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months based on signals indicating child-exploitative activity.

Why it matters

OpenAI is pulling senior regional talent from Meta just as it builds out its own Asia-Pacific leadership, while Meta’s departure comes at a moment when its India operations are already under unusually intense regulatory pressure.