Meta's Cred deal showcases new playbook: take stake, hire the founder

Meta's $900 million investment in Cred and the appointment of the fintech’s founder Kunal Shah as WhatsApp's new global head are the latest in a series of similar moves by the tech giant. Meta has run this strategy multiple times: acquire minority stake in a company, install its founder in a senior role at Meta, and have someone else at the wheel at the startup.

Finding a pattern

This was most notably seen when Meta acquired 49% stake in data labelling startup Scale AI in June 2025 for $14.8 billion. Founder Alexandr Wang left the startup to lead Meta's "superintelligence" team, leaving Scale's strategy chief, Jason Droege, to step in as interim CEO.


Ditto with Cred. While Shah joins Meta's senior leadership team, Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance at Cred since 2020, takes over as interim CEO with immediate effect.

When Meta acquired China-based Manus AI in a deal valued north of $2 billion, its founders joined the tech giant to work on general-purpose agents across its consumer and business products. Similarly, when Meta acquired agentic AI startup Dreamer, its entire founding team, which comprised former Google and Stripe executives, joined Meta's Superintelligence Labs. Dreamer continued as a standalone entity.

Multiple analysts said the Cred deal is an "acquihire in disguise".

Why Meta favours this

But why does Meta do this instead of simply roping in the senior resources it wants, or buying the company outright?

One of the reasons is speed. The acquihired teams help Meta sidestep the slow onboarding of individual hires. These are also teams that have already built shared workflows and have an equation with each other, which would take Meta months to build from scratch.

Another reason is picking up minority stakes while hiring founders allows Big Tech to avoid the scrutiny that comes with full acquisitions (e.g., Manus). In markets like India, where data localisation and foreign ownership rules are stringent, outright takeovers can get messy. But this way, Meta gets the talent and influence without taking overt control.

With Cred too, Meta doesn't get a board seat or access to its customer data. Nor does it have any voting power or access to Scale's business information despite its stake.

For the founders, there is money to be made. Dreamer's investors got back a lot more than their original investment, per reports; Cred's valuation climbed to $4.5 billion post-money, above its last $3.5 billion valuation in 2025.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has historically favoured long-tenured insiders rather than outsiders for senior positions in the company. The new acquihire strategy is the opposite, though, across AI infrastructure and agents, and now WhatsApp.