Who is Kunal Shah: Who is Indian legend Kunal Shah? To whom Mark Zuckerberg handed over the command of WhatsApp

Facebook’s parent company Meta is going to invest about $ 900 million (about ₹ 8,550 crore) in Indian fintech startup Cred. On June 22, both the companies officially announced this. Under this big deal, Cred founder Kunal Shah will now take over as the Global CEO of tech giant Meta’s messaging app WhatsApp.

Who is Kunal Shah?

It is worth noting that Kunal Shah completed his BA in Philosophy from Wilson College, Mumbai. After this he started an MBA program, but left it before completing it. In many interviews, he has told that he started working along with studies from a very young age. Later, he took admission in the part-time MBA program at NMIMS College, but did not complete the course and left it midway.

Kunal Shah started CRED in the year 2018. After his departure to WhatsApp, now Miten Sampat, who holds the second highest position in the company after him, will take charge of Cred. This is the second time that Kunal Shah is exiting one of his startups. Earlier, he had created digital payments and mobile recharge platform ‘Freecharge’, which he sold between 2015 and 2018.

From ‘Godfather’ of Startup World to Global Leader

In the last few years, Kunal Shah has become a very big and well-known face of the Indian startup ecosystem. Along with building a big company like Cred, he has also personally invested money in hundreds of early stage startups and founders of the country. His name comes at the top among the most active ‘Angel Investors’ of the country. After the success of Freecharge and Cred, now Kunal Shah is all set to make his mark at the global level.

Why will his role be important for India

This deal is important for India in many ways. First of all, this shows that a global company like Meta wants to directly enter India’s digital payments market. Currently, this market is dominated by PhonePe and Google Pay, both of them together handle about 80% of UPI transactions while WhatsApp Pay is far behind. In such a situation, Meta is trying to create a bigger digital ecosystem by combining the discovery capabilities of Facebook and Instagram, the commerce features of WhatsApp and the payment infrastructure of CRED. Secondly, this is the first time that direct leadership of a major product of one of the world’s largest tech companies, which has more than three billion users, has been handed over to an Indian founder.

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