Sandhya Devanathan, vice president of Meta’s India and South-east Asia region, is leaving Meta to join OpenAI, the ChatGPT maker told tech news outlet TechCrunch. She joined the social media giant in 2016.
Devanathan will oversee a range of activities across Southeast Asia and Australia, including customer growth, enterprise adoption, and partnerships, OpenAI said.
Devanathan is leaving Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which has faced growing criticism in India over issues such as online safety and content moderation. She has worked at the company for more than a decade. She was involved in the company’s decision process in the country, a person familiar with the matter told the outlet.
Devanathan was appointed as the company’s vice president of India and South-east Asia in June 2025. Before this position, she held several leadership roles at the company, including leading its Asia Pacific gaming business, according to the outlet.
Prabhjeet Singh, who spent over a decade at Uber, has recently joined OpenAI as Managing Director (MD) for India. He was Uber’s former president for India and South Asia.
India is one of Meta’s largest and fastest-growing markets, but the company has faced increasing pressure from the country’s authorities in recent weeks. Earlier this month, Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, apologized after mistakenly restricting a post by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in July. Following the incident, India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) summoned the company’s top officials.
At the same time, New Delhi has also expressed concern over child sexual abuse material on the platforms of the US-based social media giant.
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