Madrona Venture Group, the Seattle-based early-stage venture capital firm, today announced that it has appointed S. “Soma” Somasegar to the role of Managing Director. Somasegar joined Madrona as a Venture Partner in 2015. Before that, he was the Corporate Vice President in charge of Microsoft’s Developer Division. There, he managed products like Visual Studio and .NET.
Unsurprisingly, given his background, his investments at Madrona so far have been on the technical side. He led Madrona’s investments in Shyft and CloudCoreo, for example, and was also instrumental in the group’s investment in Heptio. He’s also on the board of Pixvana, a Seattle-based service that is looking at how to best tell stories in virtual and augmented reality
“Madrona is in a unique position. We sit at the center of the cloud industry with Microsoft and Amazon at our front and back doors – and Google’s cloud team growing quickly,” commented S. Somasegar. “There is a tremendous amount of talent base here. The opportunity for entrepreneurs is immense and I’m looking forward to taking on a bigger role helping founders build and scale successful companies, which in turn will foster the vibrant and growing Pacific NW technology ecosystem.”
Madrona also today announced that it is promoting Julie Sandler at Partner and Daniel Li to Senior Associate. In addition, the group announced that Hope Cochran, who was previously CFO of King Digital (the company behind Candy Crush) and Clearwire, is joining it as Venture Partner. Madrona tells us that Cochran will also work on its later stage financing programs to help companies connect with late-stage investors (which Madrona itself doesn’t focus on).