Neeraj Arora, who graduated from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-Delhi) in 2000, and completed MBA from Indian School of Business (ISB) in 2006, is a possible candidate of next CEO of WhatsApp, owned by Facebook, after Jan Koum quit as CEO of the messaging app company earlier this week, reported TechCrunch

Neeraj Arora, who's a former Google corporate development manager, has been with WhatsApp since 2011 and Techcrunch source described him as the No.4 at WhatsApp. Neeraj is a mergers-and-acquisitions veteran who joined WhatsApp from Google in 2011, where he largely managed the business side of the mobile-messaging start-up. Neeraj has also served as Chief Manager at Times Internet, according to his LinkedIn profile.

If Neeraj becomes CEO at WhatsApp, he will then join the league of Indian-origin CEOs of global tech majors such as Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Interestingly, Neeraj is also a startup investor with investments in many Indian startups including Zomato, ClearTax, Tracxn, GOQii and Tootl, among others.

Neeraj has also served as a board member for PayTM. In February, Neeraj stepped down from the board of Paytm's parent One97 Communications, a position which he had held since 2015. It is believed that bitter quarrel between PayTM founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma and Facebook had resulted Neeraj Arora to resign from Paytm’s board.

[caption id="attachment_124191" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Neeraj Arora at Paytm Neeraj Arora (center) with PayTM's Vijay Shekhar Sharma[/caption]

WhatsApp began testing its Unified Payments Interface (UPI) based payments feature by releasing it to select users in India, in February this year. Following which, Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma said that it would kill the “open UPI system with its custom close garden implementation.”

In professional accomplishments, Neeraj worked on two patented inventions, one of which is a file delivery system for transmitting files to recipients using email, which may be used with existing email infrastructures.

Last August, Neeraj, at his Alma Mater ISB, instituted a perpetual merit-cum-need-based scholarship for deserving women candidates for its Post Graduate Programme in Management (PGP). With that, ISB registered a 300% growth in its alumni funding in the past three years.
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