Meta's India Head Sandhya Devanathan Departs to Join OpenAI

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's vice-president and India head, is leaving the company after a decade to join OpenAI in a newly created leadership role covering Southeast Asia and Australia, in one of the more high-profile executive moves in India's technology sector this year.

Devanathan will be based in Singapore and report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's managing director for the Asia-Pacific region. In her new position, she will be responsible for consumer growth, enterprise adoption and partnerships, regulatory engagement, and overall operations across Southeast Asia and Australia.

A decade at Meta

Devanathan joined Meta in 2016, when the company had just a few hundred employees in Singapore, and rose through several leadership positions over the following years. She helped build out Meta's Singapore and Vietnam businesses and its e-commerce initiatives across Southeast Asia before moving in 2020 to lead the company's gaming vertical for the Asia-Pacific region, one of its largest global business lines. She was appointed India head in 2023, taking charge of Meta's operations in one of its largest and fastest-growing markets.

In a LinkedIn post announcing her departure, Devanathan reflected on how different the landscape looked when she joined in 2016, recalling a period when "everyone was talking about digital transformation" and describing her role in helping startups, creators and the broader ecosystem grow across the region.

Benjamin Joe, Meta's vice-president for Asia-Pacific, credited Devanathan's "dedication, passion and drive" for making a lasting impact during her tenure. Arun Srinivas, Meta's India managing director and country head, who previously reported to Devanathan, will now report directly to Joe.

Why the move matters

The departure comes at a moment of heightened competition between Meta and OpenAI for talent, market share and regulatory goodwill across fast-growing markets in Asia, including India, where both companies have been expanding aggressively. OpenAI has been steadily building out its presence in the region, with offices already established in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and India, and the addition of a seasoned India-market executive is widely seen as a signal of the company's ambitions to deepen its consumer and enterprise footprint across Southeast Asia and Australia.

For Meta, the exit adds to a string of leadership changes in its largest markets this year and comes as the company faces growing regulatory scrutiny in India over content moderation, data practices and platform safety rules. The move also underscores a broader trend of senior technology executives moving between incumbent platform companies and AI-focused challengers, as firms like OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind compete to build out regional leadership teams capable of navigating local regulatory and business environments.

Devanathan's move follows a wave of AI-related investment and expansion activity in India this year, including new regional offices opened by global AI labs and a state-backed venture fund earmarked to support artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing startups in the country, as global technology firms increasingly treat India as a strategic priority market rather than a peripheral one.

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