OpenAI Hires Meta's Southeast Asia Lead as It Builds Out Regional Operations
Sandhya Devanathan, Meta's vice president for India and Southeast Asia, is leaving the company after more than a decade to join OpenAI, where she will be the senior-most leader for Southeast Asia and Australia. OpenAI confirmed the hire to TechCrunch. Devanathan will be based in Singapore and report to Kiran Mani, OpenAI's Asia-Pacific managing director, according to TechCrunch.
Her role at OpenAI is wide-ranging. She will oversee consumer growth, enterprise sales (selling AI tools to businesses), partnerships, regulatory engagement, and day-to-day operations across Southeast Asia and Australia. Taken together, that portfolio amounts to running OpenAI's commercial and regulatory strategy for the region. She is expected to begin in October, per Open The Magazine and Storyboard18.
Devanathan joined Meta in 2016 and held several leadership roles over the following decade, including heading its Asia Pacific gaming business. She was appointed vice president for India and Southeast Asia in June 2025, which means her tenure in that specific role lasted roughly fourteen months before the move.
At Meta, her departure triggers a change in reporting structure. Arun Srinivas, Meta's India managing director, will now report directly to Benjamin Joe, Meta's vice president for Asia-Pacific. This removes a layer of regional management between the India lead and the broader APAC leadership.
The hiring pattern will be familiar to anyone who followed the earlier platform wars between global tech companies. When these companies push into emerging Asian markets, they routinely recruit executives with deep regional experience from competitors who have already built the playbooks for consumer growth, ad sales, and working with regulators across many different countries. Devanathan's decade at Meta gave her exactly that kind of operational background: scaling consumer products across Southeast Asian markets where regulatory rules, languages, and competitive landscapes vary sharply from country to country.
For OpenAI, the hire signals where it sees its next phase of expansion. The portfolio description covers consumer growth alongside enterprise adoption, partnerships, and regulatory engagement, which maps to the two-pronged approach AI companies now need in the region. Consumer-facing products like ChatGPT require localized growth strategies and partnerships with telecom companies and platform distributors. Enterprise sales demand relationships with large regional businesses, government bodies, and regulated industries that have their own data-residency rules (laws requiring data about citizens to be stored within national borders) and compliance requirements. The inclusion of regulatory engagement in Devanathan's remit is notable: Southeast Asian governments have been actively developing AI governance frameworks, and Australia has already implemented voluntary AI ethics standards with discussion of mandatory guardrails for high-risk applications.
The broader context worth noting is what her departure means for Meta. Devanathan was elevated to the India and Southeast Asia VP role only in June 2025, and her exit fourteen months later leaves Meta consolidating the India business under Srinivas with a direct line to APAC leadership rather than replacing the role outright. India remains one of Meta's largest user markets by volume, and the company has faced regulatory pressure there on content moderation and data governance. Srinivas reporting directly to Joe, rather than through a dedicated India-and-Southeast-Asia VP, could indicate Meta is streamlining its regional hierarchy. It could also be an interim arrangement while the company determines how to backfill Devanathan's Southeast Asia responsibilities.
For OpenAI, Devanathan arrives at a moment when the company is scaling its international footprint aggressively. Hiring a regional leader with operational authority across consumer, enterprise, regulatory, and operational functions signals that OpenAI intends to build out in Southeast Asia and Australia not through a thin commercial layer but with the kind of full-stack regional presence that established platform companies have long maintained. The structure, a senior leader reporting to an APAC managing director, mirrors the regional hierarchies that companies like Meta, Google, and Amazon built during their own international expansion phases.
Her move also reflects a broader talent flow now running between social media platforms and AI labs. Executives with experience scaling consumer products in complex international markets bring exactly the capabilities that AI companies need as they transition from research organizations to global consumer and enterprise businesses.
