S. “Soma” Somasegar, a fixture within the Seattle tech neighborhood who served as a key chief of Microsoft’s developer enterprise for practically three a long time earlier than supporting a era of cloud and AI startups as an investor, board member and advisor, has handed away.
The information was confirmed Tuesday afternoon by Microsoft and Madrona, the Seattle-based enterprise capital agency the place Somasegar had been a key determine for the previous 11 years.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who first met Somasegar at Microsoft within the early Nineteen Nineties, remembered him in a press release as “a exceptional chief who helped develop and form Microsoft’s developer ecosystem, and an expensive good friend and colleague that I valued drastically.”
“He introduced depth, humility, and an actual dedication to empowering builders all over the place and his affect on Microsoft and the broader expertise neighborhood will dwell on!” Nadella stated.
Somasegar was 59. No explanation for demise was given. He’s survived by his spouse, Akila, and two daughters.
“Soma was beloved by so many individuals in all points of his life, and he had such a beneficiant spirit for serving to others,” stated Matt McIlwain, Madrona managing director. “We’re deeply saddened by this loss, most significantly for his spouse and his two beloved daughters.”
McIlwain added, “We’re specializing in supporting his household, the Madrona group and all those that knew and cherished Soma, together with the broader Microsoft neighborhood.”
On a private degree, Nadella and his spouse, Anu, shaped a detailed friendship with Soma and Akila over the a long time. Nadella and Somasegar had been amongst a bunch of tech leaders who co-own the Seattle Orcas, an expert cricket group based mostly within the area.
“For Anu and me, this loss could be very private,” Nadella stated. “Soma was there for us throughout among the hardest moments in our lives, all the time with quiet energy, kindness, and a way of steadiness we relied on. We are going to miss him very a lot.”
From Puducherry to Seattle
Born Aug. 13, 1966, within the southern Indian coastal city of Puducherry, Sivaramakrishnan Somasegar — identified all through his life by the nickname “Soma” — grew up in a family the place schooling got here at the beginning else, based on a 2008 profile in Mint, the Indian enterprise newspaper. His father labored as a technician at a hospital, his mom stayed residence, and neither had attended faculty.
“Meals was a secondary precedence in our home as a result of schooling was a primary precedence,” Somasegar recalled in a 2024 oral historical past performed for the Microsoft Alumni Community. “No matter little I’ve performed to date, it’s a direct results of that.”
He arrived within the U.S. in 1987 to pursue a grasp’s in pc engineering at Louisiana State College, having mistaken the “LA” in his admission letter for Los Angeles. He realized his mistake solely because the airplane was touchdown in New Orleans, he recounted within the oral historical past.
After 18 months at LSU, Somasegar enrolled in a PhD program on the State College of New York at Buffalo. He left after a single harsh winter semester to affix Microsoft, arriving in Redmond on Jan. 23, 1989 — a date he remembered exactly a long time later.
He joined the OS/2 group as a software program design engineer in take a look at, engaged on reminiscence administration and file methods. Inside six months, Microsoft’s relationship with IBM on the joint OS/2 challenge was fraying, and Somasegar was drafted in March 1990 onto what would turn out to be one of the crucial consequential initiatives within the firm’s historical past: Home windows NT.
Somasegar spent his first decade at Microsoft on the NT group, finally contributing to eight releases of the Home windows working system, as recounted in a 2015 GeekWire “Geek of the Week” profile. He rose from software program design engineer to check result in take a look at supervisor.
Through the NT years, Somasegar designed the group’s in a single day stress take a look at program and ran the day by day reliability test himself, arriving round 5:30 a.m. to stroll the halls, depart yellow sticky notes on crashed machines, and report findings on the 9 a.m. bug assembly.
He additionally based Microsoft’s India Improvement Middle in Hyderabad in 1998, which has grown into one of many firm’s largest engineering operations outdoors the US. Particularly given his roots, he typically known as the India effort one in all his proudest contributions to Microsoft.
By the point Home windows Server 2003 shipped, Somasegar had risen to vp. In December 2003, Microsoft’s then-server and instruments chief Eric Rudder requested him to take over the Developer Division — the group accountable for Visible Studio, .NET, and the instruments utilized by thousands and thousands of software program builders.
Somasegar held the function for the following 12 years, ultimately as senior vp. Underneath his management, the division prolonged its attain from Home windows into cellular and the cloud.
In 2014, Somasegar was an inside advocate and chief for Microsoft’s resolution to open-source the .NET core server runtime and framework, a shock transfer that marked a big shift within the firm’s method towards the broader developer world.
Shifting to startups at Madrona
Somasegar introduced his departure from Microsoft in October 2015, and inside weeks had joined Seattle-based Madrona Enterprise Group as a enterprise companion. He was promoted to managing director in January 2017.
At Madrona, Somasegar centered on early-stage investments in cloud infrastructure, developer instruments, AI, and what the agency calls clever purposes.
He led or performed a key function in Madrona’s investments in Snowflake, UiPath, Pulumi, Statsig, Widespread Room, Rhythms, and RelationalAI, amongst others. A number of turned multibillion-dollar firms. Statsig was acquired by OpenAI for $1.1 billion in 2025.
Somasegar additionally served on the boards of UiPath and different portfolio firms.
He remained an energetic author and commentator on the business, together with a February 2024 GeekWire visitor put up reflecting on Satya Nadella’s decade as Microsoft CEO and their friendship that started at Microsoft in 1992. He performed interviews and served as the first on-stage host of Madrona’s IA Summit in downtown Seattle final fall.
Simply this week, Somasegar was named to Enterprise Insider’s Seed 100 checklist of the very best early-stage traders of 2026.
Past enterprise capital, startups and expertise, Somasegar was deeply concerned in Seattle’s sports activities and cultural neighborhood. Along with co-owning the Seattle Orcas, he was a part of the possession group of the Seattle Sounders FC.
Ed Lazowska, the longtime College of Washington pc science professor and a fixture in Seattle’s tech neighborhood, stated Somasegar’s spirit match a convention going again to Madrona’s earliest days.
“Soma was a beautiful human being, within the custom of the 4 Madrona co-founders,” Lazowska stated, referencing Tom Alberg, Jerry Grinstein, Invoice Ruckelshaus, and Paul Goodrich.
In one in all his final prolonged conversations with GeekWire, recorded earlier this yr at Madrona’s thirtieth anniversary celebration, Somasegar mirrored on the enterprise agency’s function within the area and its philosophy of being a “trusted companion” to founders from day one.
He spoke about being a part of an early Madrona-led effort in the course of the pandemic that helped increase greater than $25 million for the All In Seattle marketing campaign to help these impacted by homelessness and different neighborhood wants.
“We’ve a day job. We need to be the very best enterprise capital guys,” he stated. “However we’re additionally all in regards to the neighborhood. We’re about embracing the neighborhood.”
Nadella stated he’ll keep in mind Somasegar’s “heat, his considerate recommendation, and the integrity he delivered to all the pieces he did.”
“Our ideas are with Akila and his daughters, and with everybody who had the privilege of figuring out him,” he stated. “He will likely be deeply missed and remembered for all he did and contributed to our business and our neighborhood.”
