Meta Platforms is investing $900 million in Indian fintech startup Cred, acquiring approximately a 20% stake in the company at a post-money valuation of $4.5 billion. Alongside the deal, Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced on Facebook on Monday that Kunal Shah, the founder and chief executive of Cred, will take over as global head of WhatsApp, replacing Will Cathcart, who is stepping down after seven years in the role.
The capital raise is structured as a Series H round combining primary investment and secondary share purchases. Shah will step down as chief executive of Cred while retaining his personal shareholding in the company. Miten Sampat, who has overseen strategy and finance at Cred since 2020, will assume the role of interim chief executive with immediate effect. Cathcart, who has led WhatsApp since 2019, will move into a new product-building role within Meta.
Cred operates an app that rewards customers for paying their credit card bills on time. The startup currently serves approximately 17 million monthly users, processes more than 40% of India's credit card bill payments, and manages lending assets worth around $2.5 billion for partner institutions. Cred recently secured a payment aggregator licence from the Reserve Bank of India. The company was last valued at approximately $3.6 billion in a funding round in May 2025, below its peak valuation of $6.4 billion reached in 2022, making the $4.5 billion post-money figure a partial recovery from that trough.
India is WhatsApp's largest market, with more than 500 million users accounting for a significant share of the app's global base of over 3 billion people. WhatsApp Pay gained traction in the country but has struggled to replicate the scale and engagement of local rivals such as PhonePe and Google Pay. Shah founded Cred in 2018 after previously building FreeCharge, one of India's early digital payments startups, and has backed more than 250 companies as a startup investor. During Cathcart's tenure, WhatsApp launched products including Communities, Channels, and AI integrations, and reached more than 100 million users in the United States.
The only publicly traded entity materially affected by the transaction is Meta Platforms (META). Cred is privately held. The deal represents Meta's most direct move yet to embed itself within India's fast-growing digital payments ecosystem through both a financial stake and a leadership appointment drawn from the country's fintech sector.
Sources: Bloomberg, The Verge, CNBC, TechCrunch, Business Standard, American Bazaar, Storyboard18