Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s vice president for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving the company after nearly a decade to join OpenAI. She’ll be based in Singapore, reporting to OpenAI’s APAC managing director Kiran Mani, and will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia.
The timing is hard to ignore. Meta has spent recent weeks fending off Indian government scrutiny over two separate controversies: Instagram mistakenly restricting a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July, and a BBC investigation that found ads allegedly offering access to child sexual abuse material. Meta says it removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months for signals of child-exploitative activity, but the damage to its relationship with New Delhi is real. Devanathan was directly involved in the company’s decision-making in India, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Her departure follows OpenAI’s hiring of Prabhjeet Singh as its India head just days ago. Singh spent over a decade at Uber leading its India and South Asia business. OpenAI has been methodically building out its APAC footprint, opening offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Delhi over the past two years.
The personnel moves suggest OpenAI is prioritizing regulatory fluency as much as market growth. Hiring executives with deep experience navigating India’s political landscape makes sense when you’re trying to expand in a country where the government has shown it will summon tech executives — Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, got that call just this month. After Devanathan’s exit, Meta’s India managing director Arun Srinivas will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company’s APAC vice president.
