Cooley and Trilegal have advised Indian fintech startup CRED on its $900 million fundraise from Meta. Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas advised CRED’s existing investors on the sale of their stakes, including GIC, Peak XV, Alpha Wave, DST Global and Coatue.
The deal, which values CRED at $4.5 billion, also sees Meta appointing CRED founder Kunal Shah to head WhatsApp globally. India is WhatsApp’s largest market with more than 500 million users, and the platform is expanding beyond messaging into payments and business services in the country, according to Reuters.
Meta’s investment is one of the largest into India’s financial technology sector in recent years, Reuters added, with the deal gives Meta a minority stake in the Bengaluru-based company without allowing it access to customer data.
The Cooley team was led by partners Rishab Kumar and Grigor Lynch, with support from Aaron Pomeroy, Meghana Bhimarao, Zi Ye and Brandon Lefebvre.
The Trilegal corporate team was led by partners Amit Khansaheb and Nikhil Sachdeva, and included counsel Narayan Gupta, senior associates Sindhujaa Nayak and C.N. Yashwanth, and associate Sidharth Sankar Pattnaik. The competition team comprised partner Aparna Mehra, counsel Kshitij Sharma, and senior associate Karan Arora.
The SAM team included Raghubir Menon, regional practice head Mumbai for M&A and private equity, partner Anirban Bhattacharya, principal associate Jeel Panchal and associate Yashwanth Samayam. Its antitrust team included partner Yaman Verma and senior associate Apurv Jain.
