Sandhya Devanathan's move from Meta to OpenAI

Sandhya Devanathan spent more than a decade at Meta, joining in January 2016 and rising from a regional e-commerce leadership role to Vice President of Gaming for Asia Pacific in 2020, then Vice President and Managing Director of Meta India in November 2022, before her remit expanded to cover Southeast Asia in 2025 ^[1]. Before Meta, she spent nearly ten years at Citi working in online banking, consumer lending and payments across India, the Philippines and the US, and later led retail banking and payments at Standard Chartered in Singapore ^[2]. That 25-plus-year arc through banking and social platforms is exactly what OpenAI appears to be buying: Open Magazine's analysis frames the hire as evidence that AI competition is moving from a phase where researchers raced to build smarter models into one where operators price, distribute, localise, sell and defend those models before regulators step in ^[2]. At OpenAI, she will oversee consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, operations and government and regulatory engagement across Southeast Asia and Australia ^[2]- essentially the same playbook she ran for Meta, now pointed at unseating it.

Devanathan is not an isolated hire. OpenAI brought in Kiran Mani, a former JioStar executive, as its Managing Director for Asia Pacific in March 2026 ^[3], and Devanathan will report directly to him from Singapore ^[3]. Three months later, in June 2026, OpenAI named Prabhjeet Singh, the former president of Uber India, as its India Managing Director, expected to join in September 2026 ^[3]- a month before Devanathan's own October 2026 start date ^[2]. In under seven months, OpenAI has assembled a three-person regional leadership bench pulled entirely from companies - JioStar, Uber, Meta - that already know how to scale a global consumer platform through Asia's fragmented, high-friction local markets ^[2].

The timing lands awkwardly for Meta. Devanathan announced her departure on LinkedIn on Friday, August 28, 2026, without disclosing further details ^[4]. Her exit follows a stretch of India-specific trouble for the company: Instagram mistakenly restricted an account belonging to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, prompting an apology and a government summons of company executives, and the company separately removed roughly 160,000 accounts in India over six months tied to child-exploitation signals ^[5]. In the aftermath of her departure, Meta is also consolidating its India reporting line: India managing director Arun Srinivas will now report directly to Benjamin Joe, Meta's vice president for Asia-Pacific, rather than through the role Devanathan is vacating ^[5].

The market Devanathan is being paid to win over is substantial. Southeast Asia is home to more than 600 million people spanning markets with distinct regulatory and go-to-market requirements ^[2], and Indonesia and the Philippines already rank among OpenAI's ten largest markets globally by ChatGPT users ^[2][4]. That scale is also fragmented: each market carries its own payment infrastructure, telecom partnerships and regulatory regime, which is why OpenAI is pairing model access with a leader whose job for the past decade was navigating exactly that kind of fragmentation on behalf of a rival platform ^[2].