Meta India Veteran Sandhya Devanathan Joins OpenAI

Sandhya Devanathan, Meta’s Vice President and Head of India and Southeast Asia, is leaving the company after more than a decade to join OpenAI as Vice President for Southeast Asia and Australia. 

She will take up the new role in October after a short break and will be based in Singapore, reporting to Kiran Mani, OpenAI’s Managing Director for Asia-Pacific.

Her responsibilities will include driving consumer growth, enterprise adoption and partnerships, while also overseeing regional operations and engagement with regulators. She will also work on building partnerships across the AI ecosystem and expanding the adoption of OpenAI products among businesses, institutions and governments.

Devanathan announced her departure from Meta on LinkedIn, describing the decision as bittersweet. 

“After more than a decade at Meta, I’ve made the bittersweet decision to move on to my next adventure. Saying goodbye to this incredible company and my amazing colleagues has been really difficult, but I leave with a heart full of gratitude and excitement about what lies ahead,” she wrote.

“I joined Meta when we had just about 300 employees in Singapore. The landscape looked so different in 2016 - everyone was talking about digital transformation. And we were right in the midst of it - helping startups, companies, creators and the ecosystem grow across the region while delivering great experiences for our hundreds of millions of our users,” she wrote looking back her time at the company.

During her tenure, she worked across ecommerce and gaming in Asia-Pacific, helped build Meta’s businesses and teams in Singapore and Vietnam, and worked on its ecommerce initiatives across Southeast Asia. In 2020, she took charge of Meta’s gaming business in APAC.

Devanathan was appointed Vice President and Head of Meta India in late 2022 and formally took over the role in January 2023. She later assumed responsibility for Southeast Asia as well and relocated to Singapore in June 2025.

She also mentioned the impact of Meta’s platforms in India and Southeast Asia, including the use of WhatsApp for government citizen services in India, the growth of small businesses in Vietnam, Indonesia and Thailand, and startups in Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines that went on to become unicorns. “I’m proud of the work we’ve done together,” Devanathan said.

At Meta, Arun Srinivas will continue to lead the company’s India operations following Devanathan’s departure. Srinivas, who took over as Meta’s Managing Director and Head for India in July 2025, will now report directly to Benjamin Joe, Meta’s Vice President for Asia-Pacific, and join his regional leadership team. 

Devanathan’s move comes as OpenAI continues to expand its presence across Asia-Pacific. The company has opened offices in Singapore, Tokyo, Seoul, Sydney and New Delhi over the past two years and has been strengthening its regional leadership. In June, OpenAI appointed former Uber India and South Asia President Prabhjeet Singh as its Managing Director for India.