Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's vice president for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving the company to join OpenAI, where she will run consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia from Singapore. She reports to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's Asia-Pacific managing director. Devanathan spent more than a decade at Meta, most recently overseeing one of its most sensitive and fastest-growing regions.
The hire lands days after Prabhjeet Singh, who spent more than a decade at Uber running its India and South Asia business, joined OpenAI as India head. Together, the two appointments fill the top two commercial seats OpenAI needs to actually sell into and defend the region — a country-lead in Delhi and a regional-lead in Singapore — in the space of a single week.
OpenAI has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi over the past two years, and the Asia-Pacific structure under Mani is now taking recognizable shape. The company is building out a country-by-country commercial and policy footprint of the kind the hyperscalers took a decade to assemble. Devanathan's Meta experience — regulatory, gaming, consumer scale — maps closely onto the mix of jobs OpenAI needs done in the region.
Key facts
- 01Sandhya Devanathan is leaving Meta after more than a decade to become an OpenAI executive based in Singapore.
- 02She will report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's Asia-Pacific managing director, covering Southeast Asia and Australia.
- 03Her move follows Prabhjeet Singh, a 10-year Uber veteran, joining OpenAI as India head days earlier.
- 04OpenAI has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi over the past two years.
- 05Meta said it removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months for signals of child-exploitative activity.
Devanathan joined Meta in 2016 and held several leadership roles at the company, including running its Asia Pacific gaming business, before being appointed vice president for India and Southeast Asia in June last year. That promotion lasted roughly 14 months before she left for OpenAI. Following her departure, Meta's India managing director Arun Srinivas will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company's Asia-Pacific vice president, collapsing a management layer.
The exit comes during a stretch of unusually direct pressure on Meta from Indian authorities. Earlier this month, the company apologized after Instagram mistakenly restricted a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July. The Indian government summoned Meta executives, including chief global affairs officer Joel Kaplan, over the incident.
New Delhi has also raised concerns over child sexual abuse material on Meta's platforms. Last month, the Indian government sought an explanation from the company after a BBC report described Instagram advertisements that allegedly offered access to such content. Meta said in a blog post at the time that it had removed violating ads and accounts, and rejected suggestions that it knowingly targeted such advertisements at users based on inappropriate interests. The company said it had removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months based on signals indicating child-exploitative activity.
Devanathan was involved in Meta's India decision process during that period, according to a person familiar with the matter — meaning her handoff to Srinivas comes at a moment when the country's regulators are actively demanding answers. Whether Meta backfills the India and Southeast Asia VP role or leaves Srinivas reporting directly up to Joe on a longer basis will be one signal of how the company is choosing to weight regional leadership against cost.
For OpenAI, the recruiting pattern is now clear: hire from the operators who spent the last decade building consumer scale and government relationships in Asia. Singh brings the Uber playbook of navigating Indian ride-hail regulation and payments; Devanathan brings the Meta playbook of managing content, ads and platform-liability conversations with governments across the region. This is not a research bench. It is a distribution and policy bench.
There is a caveat worth naming. OpenAI's Asia-Pacific expansion is early-stage against entrenched competition — Google's Gemini has default-app distribution across Android, and local Indian model efforts are attracting government backing. Hiring senior Meta and Uber operators does not automatically translate into share, and the Indian regulatory environment that helped push Devanathan's old employer into the news will apply just as much to her new one. OpenAI has not disclosed India or Southeast Asia revenue.
The story is less about one executive move than about how quickly OpenAI is now standing up a full commercial organization in the region that will matter most for consumer AI adoption in the back half of the decade. The company has stopped behaving like a research lab that also sells API access and started behaving like a global platform company that needs country managers, regulatory heads and government-affairs muscle. When you can pull the India-Southeast Asia VP out of Meta and the India lead out of Uber inside a single week, the talent market is telling you where the next platform race is being run.
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