📰 Key Takeaway

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s VP for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving to join OpenAI, a move confirmed by OpenAI to TechCrunch. She’ll be based in Singapore, reporting to OpenAI’s Asia-Pacific managing director Kiran Mani, covering consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement, and operations across Southeast Asia and Australia. Devanathan spent over a decade at Meta, joining in 2016, leading APAC gaming before being promoted to VP for India and Southeast Asia last June, a role that also put her in the middle of the company’s India market decisions. Her departure comes just days after Prabhjeet Singh, former head of Uber’s India and South Asia business with over a decade there, joined OpenAI as India country head. OpenAI has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney, and Delhi over the past two years as it keeps expanding its APAC footprint. After Devanathan’s exit, Meta India’s managing director Arun Srinivas will report directly to the company’s APAC VP Benjamin Joe. The reshuffle comes as Meta faces mounting regulatory pressure in India: earlier this month Instagram mistakenly restricted the visibility of a post from Prime Minister Modi, prompting an apology from Meta and summons from the Indian government for senior executives including global affairs chief Joel Kaplan. Last month, the Indian government also pressed Meta for answers after a BBC report alleged Instagram ads involving child sexual exploitation content. Meta responded that it had taken down the violating ads and accounts, denied deliberately targeting users interested in such content, and noted it had removed 160,000 accounts in India over the past six months based on signals of child exploitation activity.

💬 JudyAI Lab Take

Meta’s India and Southeast Asia VP Sandhya Devanathan moving to OpenAI, on the heels of a former Uber India executive doing the same, signals that OpenAI is building out a localized management bench in APAC rather than just running the region by remote control from HQ.

What stands out is that “consumer growth,” “enterprise adoption,” and “regulatory engagement” are all bundled into one role — a sign OpenAI now treats APAC as a market that needs deep, dedicated ownership, not just a global product rollout with a local sticker slapped on. Meanwhile Meta is dealing with regulatory heat in India over the Instagram post-restriction mishap and child-safety ad issues — a reminder that once an AI product hits real scale, the product team’s job stops being purely technical and starts being about cross-border regulation and long-term public trust.

Worth asking before your next international product push: who on your team owns regulatory engagement, not just who owns growth.

📅 Source Info

🔗 Further Reading