Sandhya Devanathan is leaving Meta after more than a decade to join OpenAI in a regional leadership role spanning Southeast Asia and Australia.
OpenAI told TechCrunch that Devanathan will be based in Singapore and report to Asia-Pacific managing director Kiran Mani. Her remit combines consumer growth, enterprise adoption, partnerships, regulatory engagement and operations.
The move gives OpenAI an executive with long experience inside a major consumer platform as it expands offices and leadership across Asia Pacific. It also creates a reporting change for Meta’s India business during a period of regulatory pressure.
OpenAI assigns a broad regional mandate
Devanathan’s responsibilities reach across commercial and government-facing work. She will oversee consumer growth and enterprise adoption while also managing partnerships, operations and engagement with regulators in Southeast Asia and Australia.
The appointment follows another senior regional hire. Prabhjeet Singh joined OpenAI as its India head only days earlier after more than a decade at Uber, where he led the India and South Asia business.
OpenAI has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and Delhi during the past two years. The source does not provide user, revenue or staffing figures for those locations, so the scale of the expansion cannot be measured from the announcement alone.
Devanathan’s base in Singapore places her within that existing office network. TechCrunch does not report her start date or identify specific products and partnerships she will prioritize.
A decade at Meta informs the transition
Devanathan joined Meta in 2016 and held several leadership positions. Her work included responsibility for the company’s Asia-Pacific gaming business before she became vice president for India and Southeast Asia in June 2025.
At Meta, she participated in decisions affecting the India business, according to a person familiar with the company cited by TechCrunch. That background is relevant to a new job that explicitly includes regulatory engagement, although OpenAI did not explain how individual parts of her experience shaped the hire.
After her departure, Meta’s India managing director Arun Srinivas will report directly to Benjamin Joe, the company’s Asia-Pacific vice president. The article does not say whether Meta will replace Devanathan with another executive holding the same combined regional title.
The personnel change is verified by OpenAI and described by sources familiar with Meta’s reporting structure. Motives behind Devanathan’s decision were not provided, and the move should not be treated as evidence that regulatory controversies caused her exit.
Meta’s India scrutiny forms the immediate backdrop
Meta has faced renewed questions from Indian authorities over content moderation and online safety. Earlier in August, the company apologized after Instagram mistakenly restricted a post by prime minister Narendra Modi in July. The government summoned Meta executives, including global affairs chief Joel Kaplan, over that incident.
New Delhi has also raised concerns about child sexual abuse material on Meta’s platforms. In July, the government requested an explanation after a BBC report found Instagram advertisements that allegedly offered access to such content.
Meta said it removed violating advertisements and accounts and rejected the suggestion that it knowingly targeted the ads using inappropriate interests. The company also said it had removed 160,000 accounts in India over six months based on signals of child-exploitative activity.
Those events make regulatory experience particularly visible around Devanathan’s departure, but TechCrunch does not establish that she was personally responsible for the disputed moderation outcomes. Nor does it say her move changes Meta’s policies in India.
For OpenAI, the concrete gain is a senior operator charged with connecting adoption, partnerships and government relations across several markets. For Meta, the immediate consequence is a reshaped reporting line while scrutiny continues. The broader competitive meaning will depend on decisions and results that neither company has yet disclosed.
