WhatsApp’s $900 million bet on Kunal Shah

When CRED last raised around $75 million as a part of its Series G in June 2025, it saw names such as GIC, RTP Capital and Sofina Ventures come in as investors. But the fundraise saw the valuation of the company taking a hit of nearly 45% from its 2022 valuation of $6.4 billion; in 2025, the valuation dropped to $3.5 billion.

However, June 22, 2026 brought some good news. Not only did CRED manage to get tech giant Meta on its cap table with its Series H fundraise of $900 million, it also improved its valuation to $4.5 billion. While the value of CRED’s shares may have seen just a low single-digit rise, Meta will not be joining the board. But what did the tech giant gain in exchange? It managed to convince CRED founder Shah to step down as CEO and leave the board to take on the role of heading WhatsApp globally. Now, CRED is just another investment for Shah, with him having no role to play؅—even as an advisor, say sources.

Cracking the India market

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to Facebook to announce Shah joining the company. “Kunal Shah will join Meta as WhatsApp’s next leader. Kunal built CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world’s biggest messaging app. I look forward to working with Kunal to continue to make WhatsApp the best service for billions of people and millions of businesses,” he said in his post.

For a company with its messaging app having an estimated penetration of over 800 million users in India, cracking the fintech play has remained elusive. While India’s small businesses unofficially conduct their entire selling and reaching out to customers on the app, they don’t use WhatsApp as a default payment method. Today, Walmart-backed PhonePe, and rival big tech company Google’s Google Pay control nearly 80% of the UPI payments in the country.

In July last year, Greyhound Research’s Sanchit Vir Gogia sharing his thoughts on WhatsApp’s strategy in India’s UPI space, said that their research pointed at Meta’s approach to WhatsApp Pay in India being aligned with a much broader, long-term commerce strategy rather than short-term competition in the fintech space. “Rather than positioning WhatsApp Pay as a standalone UPI challenger, Meta seems focussed on enhancing platform utility across small and medium businesses,” he had said. “This aligns with Meta’s global strategy of enabling value exchange within existing user behaviour rather than introducing siloed financial products.”

Further, the report had said, “The result is a payments capability that supports ecosystem utility, but does not yet mirror the aggressive product and marketing approach seen in some other players. This may be intentional: a signal that Meta views UPI as a foundational layer for enabling future experiences, rather than as a standalone business objective.”

A glance at Meta’s latest financials show that user numbers for its Family of Apps (FoA)—Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp—have stagnated over the last three quarters at around 3.5 billion-plus globally. However, FoA revenue for the quarter ending March 31, 2026, increased by $14.01 billion, or 33% year-on-year, entirely driven by advertising revenue. During the same quarter, the other revenue for FoA increased $375 million, or 74%, mostly driven by paid messaging from WhatsApp and Meta Verified subscriptions. For the company, the Asia-Pacific region has seen the highest growth in ad impressions—from 9% in Q12025 to 23% in Q42025 and 24% in Q12026; but the average ad price for the region remains the lowest compared to any other region.

In the earnings call Zuckerberg, laying out the AI play in commerce across FoA, said, “Our ads today help businesses find just the right very specific people who are interested in their products. New agentic shopping tools will allow people to find just the right very specific set of products from the businesses in our catalogue. We’re focussed on making these experiences work across both our feeds and across business messaging—significantly increasing the capabilities of WhatsApp over time.”

Shah’s entry and the understanding and familiarity with the fintech ecosystem brings in a much-needed directional approach to WhatsApp’s large global user base. Especially in the India market where WhatsApp entered the payments party late, and cracking the transactions numbers may be the first step. But Meta, with rich insights of its users, will be relying on Shah’s learnings from CRED to think out of the box to draw better value from business users of WhatsApp in India.

What’s in it for CRED?

While announcing Shah’s move, CRED said that Miten Sampat—who has led strategy and finance since 2020—would take over as interim CEO with immediate effect, even as the board and the leadership chalk out the path for the company. According to Tracxn data, before its Series H fundraise, Shah and the company’s ESOP pool held nearly 23% stake in CRED, while various funds held nearly 73.3%, with Peak XV Partners holding the largest chunk.

Shailendra Singh, MD, Peak XV Partners, who was also an investor in Freecharge—Shah’s earlier venture—and an early investor in CRED, said in a statement that given that the company has been a category creator, “we are excited about the next phase of CRED as it strengthens the product, platform, and distribution moats it has built, and believe it will go from strength to strength in the years ahead”.

Shah said that the company’s revenue was now at around ₹3,200 crore, it had a full stack of licences, and was a strong brand. “On this foundation, with additional capital and an extraordinarily talented team, CRED is poised to become an enduring institution for decades to come,” he said. In January, CRED had shared its financial performance for FY25, and stated that its consolidated operating revenue for the year stood at ₹2,735 crore, 16% higher year-on-year, with gross margins at 70% and operating losses down by 51% to ₹298 crore. CRED attributed this partly to deeper engagement of its users with the platform through multiple products that resulted in strong monetisation; 45% of active members engaged with three or more products resulting in an ARPU of ₹2,000, the company said in a release. During the reported fiscal, CRED’s lending business grew with AUM hovering at around ₹22,000 crore, and lending was one of the Top 3 revenue drivers, along with payments and insurance. 

The fund infusion comes at a time when the company is looking to deepen its play both on the merchant side and the wealth management side, given its affluent user base. Though CRED started out as a credit card payment management facilitator with redeemable rewards, today it has branched out into other allied financial services such as investment , wealth management and  lending through partners including IDFC FIRST Bank, Aditya Birla Capital, and Newtap Finance Private Ltd (where Shah has a majority stake), among others.

With 17-million-plus captive users and 60% of multi-card holders in India active on its platform, Shah, in an interview to Fortune India earlier this year, had said that CRED’s monetisation plans are around two broad categories. “One is cross-selling and distribution of financial services from regulated companies like banks, NBFCs, insurance, wealth companies, and we will continue to do that. We also help brands and merchants cross-sell on our platforms through deals, promotions, shopping, and so on,” Shah had said.  According to the company, the lending business has now grown to ₹24,000 crore (~$2.5 billion+) in managed AUM for the top financial institutions in India.

In March this year, CRED got the Reserve Bank of India’s nod to operate as a payment aggregator. This lets it on-board merchants, collect payments on their behalf across instruments, and handle settlement along with its earlier Prepaid Payment Instrument (PPI) licence. The licence, which lets the company tap into India’s merchant ecosystem alongside others such as PhonePe, Razorpay, and PB Fintech in the domestic online transactions space. 

In April, in a bid to deepen its penetration into wealth management and advisory—a category Shah believes remains underpenetrated—CRED revamped its ‘Kuvera’ app. It has partnered with four AMCs—DSP Asset Managers, ICICI Prudential Asset Management Company, Aditya Birla Sun Life AMC, and HDFC Asset Management Company—to offer a curated set of liquid funds on the platform. It also has a new feature allowing investors to withdraw up to ₹4 lakh within five minutes, with the full amount redeemable within 24 hours. On the future of the category, Shah had said earlier that the idea was to build for the new set of wealthy and in a way that is more simplistic and easier to consume on a regular intervention basis. With high-creditworthy users on the CRED app, the idea is to cross-pollinate its investment offerings. Without setting timelines, Shah had told Fortune India that the company plans to launch many more things on Kuvera. “We want to truly establish how you are doing first on the base line and then propose things based on it,” Shah had said. 

Now with the new dry powder, this perhaps leaves CRED with elbow room to splurge on needs to deepen its play in categories and compete with incumbents in the fintech space. Shah had said earlier that CRED would go public only when the time is right for the company. But with the ‘Kunal Shah premium’ gone and a new CEO in place, much of the execution by the team will now decide the opportune time for the company to look good to go public.