OpenAI has hired Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s outgoing vice president for India and Southeast Asia, to run consumer growth, enterprise partnerships, and regulatory engagement for Southeast Asia and Australia. She will work out of Singapore and report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s managing director for the Asia-Pacific region. Her exit closes out a career at Meta that began in 2016.
Devanathan held several leadership posts inside Meta over that decade, among them leading gaming for the Asia-Pacific region, before she took the India and Southeast Asia vice president job in June of last year. TechCrunch heard from someone with knowledge of the situation that she helped shape what the company decided in India in particular. Meta has not commented publicly on her departure.
Her move to OpenAI arrives days after Prabhjeet Singh took the newly created role of India head at the company. Singh spent more than ten years at Uber, most recently leading its India and South Asia business, before making the same jump. Two hires from outside the AI industry, both landing senior Asia-Pacific posts inside OpenAI within the same stretch of weeks, point to a company staffing up regional operations with people who already know how to run consumer platforms and manage governments in the market, not just people who know how to ship models.
That staffing pattern tracks a broader buildout. Across the last two years OpenAI has planted offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi, a geographic footprint aimed at the region Meta has spent a decade building distribution in. Meta, for its part, is restructuring around the gap Devanathan leaves. Arun Srinivas, the company’s India managing director, will now report directly to Benjamin Joe, Meta’s vice president for the Asia-Pacific region, per a source with knowledge of the change.
Devanathan’s exit is not happening in a quiet period for Meta in India. An apology followed earlier this month over a July incident in which Instagram wrongly limited a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The mistake was grave enough that New Delhi called in Meta leadership to account for it, Joel Kaplan among them in his role heading global affairs. Separately, New Delhi leaned on Meta last month once the BBC reported finding ads on Instagram that allegedly sold access to child sexual abuse material. Meta said it removed the violating ads and accounts, disputed any suggestion it had knowingly targeted such advertising, and said that inside a six-month window it had already removed 160,000 Indian accounts flagged by signals associated with child exploitation.
TechCrunch, which confirmed the hire directly with OpenAI, reported the personnel move and the regulatory episodes in the same story without linking them causally, and neither company has suggested the two are connected. Treat them as parallel facts rather than cause and effect until either side says otherwise.
What the move does confirm is a legible signal in an industry that otherwise runs on opaque compute deals and unverifiable benchmark claims: where a well-regarded operator chooses to spend the next years of their career. A Meta veteran who spent a decade building the company’s presence in one of its largest user markets is now building OpenAI’s presence in the same region instead. For any team tracking which company is likeliest to win distribution across Southeast Asia and Australia over the next few years, that is a more concrete data point than either company’s own marketing about the region. Watch whether OpenAI backs the hire with local product launches or enterprise contracts in the next two quarters; the hire signals intent, not yet outcome.
TechCrunch reported the hire and Meta’s regulatory troubles in India in a story published August 28, 2026.
