S. 'Soma' Somasegar, 1966-2026: Microsoft and Madrona leader was a champion of developers and startups – GeekWire
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by Todd Bishop on May 19, 2026 at 5:05 pmMay 19, 2026 at 6:19 pm
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S. “Soma” Somasegar at Microsoft in 2014, giving a tour of the revamped Developer Division offices. (GeekWire File Photo / Todd Bishop)
S. “Soma” Somasegar, a fixture in the Seattle tech community who led Microsoft’s Developer Division as part of his 27-year tenure at the company before supporting a generation of cloud and AI startups as an investor, board member and advisor, has passed away.
The news was confirmed Tuesday afternoon by Microsoft and Madrona, the Seattle-based venture capital firm where Somasegar had been a key figure for the past 11 years.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who first met Somasegar at Microsoft in the early 1990s, remembered him in a statement as “a remarkable leader who helped grow and shape Microsoft’s developer ecosystem, and a dear friend and colleague that I valued greatly.”
“He brought depth, humility, and a real commitment to empowering developers everywhere and his impact on Microsoft and the broader technology community will live on!” Nadella said.
Somasegar was 59. No cause of death was given. He is survived by his wife, Akila, and two daughters.
“Soma was beloved by so many people in all aspects of his life, and he had such a generous spirit for helping others,” said Matt McIlwain, Madrona managing director. “We are deeply saddened by this loss, most importantly for his wife and his two beloved daughters.”
McIlwain added, “We are focusing on supporting his family, the Madrona team and all those who knew and loved Soma, including the broader Microsoft community.”
Tuesday evening on its website, Madrona posted an initial tribute to Somasegar, saying, in part: “We all loved Soma, as everyone who knew him did.”
On a personal level, Nadella and his wife, Anu, formed a close friendship with Soma and Akila over the decades. Nadella and Somasegar were among a group of tech leaders who co-own the Seattle Orcas, a professional cricket team based in the region.
“For Anu and me, this loss is very personal,” Nadella said. “Soma was there for us during some of the toughest moments in our lives, always with quiet strength, kindness, and a sense of steadiness we depended on. We will miss him very much.”
From Puducherry to Seattle
Born Aug. 13, 1966, in the southern Indian coastal town of Puducherry, Sivaramakrishnan Somasegar — known throughout his life by the nickname “Soma” — grew up in a household where education came before everything else, according to a 2008 profile in Mint, the Indian business newspaper. His father worked as a technician at a hospital, his mother stayed home, and neither had attended college.
“Food was a secondary priority in our house because education was a first priority,” Somasegar recalled in a 2024 oral history conducted for the Microsoft Alumni Network. “Whatever little I’ve done so far, it’s a direct result of that.”
He arrived in the U.S. in 1987 to pursue a master’s in computer engineering at Louisiana State University, having mistaken the “LA” in his admission letter for Los Angeles. He realized his mistake only as the plane was landing in New Orleans, he recounted in the oral history.
After 18 months at LSU, Somasegar enrolled in a PhD program at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He left after a single harsh winter semester to join Microsoft, arriving in Redmond on Jan. 23, 1989 — a date he remembered precisely decades later.
He joined the OS/2 team as a software design engineer in test, working on memory management and file systems. Within six months, Microsoft’s relationship with IBM on the joint OS/2 project was fraying, and Somasegar was drafted in March 1990 onto what would become one of the most consequential projects in the company’s history: Windows NT.
Somasegar spent his first decade at Microsoft on the NT team, ultimately contributing to eight releases of the Windows operating system, as recounted in a 2015 GeekWire “Geek of the Week” profile. He rose from software design engineer to test lead to test manager.
During the NT years, Somasegar designed the team’s overnight stress test program and ran the daily reliability check himself, arriving around 5:30 a.m. to walk the halls, leave yellow sticky notes on crashed machines, and report findings at the 9 a.m. bug meeting.
He also founded Microsoft’s India Development Center in Hyderabad in 1998, which has grown into one of the company’s largest engineering operations outside the United States. Especially given his roots, he often called the India effort one of his proudest contributions to Microsoft.
By the time Windows Server 2003 shipped, Somasegar had risen to vice president. In December 2003, Microsoft’s then-server and tools chief Eric Rudder asked him to take over the...