Meta’s India and Southeast Asia chief leaves for OpenAI in Singapore

Sandhya Devanathan is leaving Meta after more than ten years to run OpenAI's work in Southeast Asia and Australia. She said so on LinkedIn on Friday. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed the hire. She starts in October, will sit in Singapore, and will report to Kiran Mani, the company's Asia-Pacific managing director, who joined in March.

The role is new. Devanathan will be the senior-most OpenAI lead in that slice of the map. The brief covers consumer growth, enterprise deals, partnerships, operations and talks with regulators. It does not include India. That market sits with Prabhjeet Singh, hired from Uber in June as managing director for India.

The split matters. OpenAI has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and New Delhi in the past two years. India is the large user base and the first country where ChatGPT is selling ads to Free and Go users. Southeast Asia and Australia are the next growth belt the company wants a dedicated operator for. Devanathan has run both India and Southeast Asia for Meta, so she arrives with the contacts and the regulatory scars from those markets.

What she did at Meta

She joined Meta in 2016 when the Singapore office had about 300 people. She worked ecommerce and gaming across Asia-Pacific, then became vice president for gaming in the region in 2020. In January 2023 she took the India vice-president job after Ajit Mohan left. In June 2025 she added Southeast Asia and moved to Singapore. Arun Srinivas became managing director for India a month later.

India is Meta's largest user market, with more than a billion people on its apps. Devanathan's own list of the years includes WhatsApp used for government services in India, small-business storefronts in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, and startups that grew into unicorns in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines. Benjamin Joe, Meta's Asia-Pacific vice president, said Srinivas will now report to him and take the India brief forward.

She described the exit as bittersweet and said she would take a short break before the October start. She has more than 25 years in technology and financial services.

Why OpenAI is hiring this way

OpenAI is hiring country and regional operators from consumer internet firms rather than only from research labs. Mani came in to run APAC. Singh came from Uber's India and South Asia presidency. Devanathan comes from the Meta seat that sat closest to Indian and ASEAN regulators. That pattern fits a company that is now selling ads in India, opening paid tiers, and arguing with governments about safety, copyright and data.

Southeast Asia is not one regulator. Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Australia each write their own rules on AI labelling, child accounts, election content and government use. A regional lead who has already moved a billion-user consumer app through those capitals is the hire OpenAI is paying for.

The job also sits next to competition. Google, Anthropic and Meta are all hiring in the same cities. Meta loses a vice president who knew both the India P&L and the ASEAN one. It still has Srinivas in Mumbai and Joe across the region. OpenAI gains a person who has sat in the meetings those companies will now have with the same officials.

What is not in the announcement

Neither company published a headcount, a revenue target or a product date attached to her name. There is no statement on whether she will handle Australia's existing safety talks or Indonesia's data-localisation file on day one. The confirmed facts are the title, the geography, the reporting line, the October start and the India exclusion.

For readers who already saw the LinkedIn post, the useful detail is the org chart. OpenAI has separated India from Southeast Asia and Australia. Devanathan owns the second block. Singh owns the first. Mani owns both of them. That is the structure the company will take into the next round of licensing and public-sector deals in the region.