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There are a few cliches about Bengaluru that are regularly trotted out in conversations: The traffic. The weather. The hype around Rameshwaram Cafe (you love it or hate it, there’s no middle ground).
In banter involving the city’s startup and hustle culture, the equivalent became: “But what does CRED do?” Now, with global tech behemoth Meta leading a colossal USD 900 million investment into the fintech unicorn and CRED’s founder, Kunal Shah, set to take over as global head of WhatsApp, owned by Meta, that question may just be redundant.
For messaging platform WhatsApp, its investment in CRED and the hiring of its founder as chief executive come at a critical time. With over 500 million users, India is the single largest market for WhatsApp, which has over 3 billion users on its messaging platform worldwide. Yet, despite its ubiquity in the lives of Indians and the widespread adoption of digital payments via UPI (unified payments interface) throughout the country, WhatsApp has not been able to monetise its fintech services, especially WhatsApp Pay, sufficiently.
National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI), the body which oversees UPI, had initially placed a cap on the rollout of WhatsApp Pay, limiting it to 40 million users initially, then increasing it to 100 million and eventually lifting the cap at the end of 2024. By that time, PhonePe, owned by Walmart, and Google Pay had become well-entrenched as the dominant players in a market processing over 13 billion UPI transactions a month at the time. With Kunal now taking over as WhatsApp’s chief from Will Cathcart, there would be expectations that this will change.
“Despite everyone believing WhatsApp would become a leader in payments, the duopoly of PhonePe and Google Pay is still holding good, so WhatsApp Pay, despite having distribution, lacks adoption. Kunal is someone who excels at creating adoption and driving distribution, so this move makes sense,” says Siddharth Pai, founding partner of 3one4 Capital. “It’s also an acknowledgement from Meta that when it comes to some of these markets, it’s best to get local talent who’ve already done this.”
In a post on X about his appointment and the investment in CRED, Kunal wrote that “While it has come very far, the delta between WhatsApp today and its full potential is massive.” NPCI data, as reported by Moneycontrol, shows that in May 2026, PhonePe and Google Pay commanded close to 80% of the UPI market. Interestingly, CRED, which targets a more affluent customer segment, came in 8th in the market with 0.68% market share, just above WhatsApp Pay, with 0.65%. The monthly UPI transactions in that month crossed 23 billion.
Speaking about Meta’s choice of Kunal, Siddharth said he was someone who had done phenomenally well, first with the successful scale and sale of his previous startup Freecharge and now, with building and scaling CRED. “When you look at the roster of people who have built and scaled up consumer tech in emerging markets multiple times over, it’s fairly small.” If the template succeeds, Siddharth expects to see more such deals involving the hiring of founders of Indian consumer tech startups by large firms, both foreign and domestic.
Three years after he sold his online recharge startup Freecharge for about USD 400 million to Snapdeal, Kunal founded Cred in 2018 as a members-only platform which incentivised and rewarded members for timely payment of their credit card bills. It was “a platform to celebrate and reward the most creditworthy people of India,” the philosophy graduate from Mumbai’s Wilson College had at the time.
Over the years, CRED, which leaned into its “not everyone gets it” identity and attracted eyeballs for its catchy advertising campaigns, expanded into UPI payments, lending, insurance and wealth management services. Along the way, it raised over USD 900 million across 12 rounds from marquee investors such as Tiger Global, Peak XV Partners and Ribbit Capital, among others. The current deal values the fintech company at USD 4.5 billion. Revenue grew by leaps and bounds, with the startup clocking Rs 2,803 crore in 2024-25 but it continued to be in the red, with losses touching Rs 1,461 crore in the same period, according to Tracxn.
Kunal confirmed in his post on X that he would be stepping away from operations at CRED though he would continue as a shareholder and that his “commitment doesn’t change”. Miten Sampat, who was heading strategy and finance, will be taking over as interim CEO. Kunal also wrote that Meta would be a minority investor in CRED and would not have access to member data. Meta’s significant investment is expected to give CRED sufficient capital for further expansion.
As for the quips around its business model, Siddharth Pai says: “The answer to what CRED does is that CRED makes money.”
