WSO2 Founder Sanjiva Weerawarana Steps Down as CEO After Two Decades
WSO2 Founder and Chief Executive Officer Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana is stepping down from the company he founded in 2005, with his departure effective June 2026. The board has appointed Chief Revenue Officer Devaka Randeniya as acting CEO while a permanent successor search gets under way.
The transition marks the end of a two-decade run during which Weerawarana took WSO2 from a small open-source middleware startup in Colombo to a company that now processes more than 60 trillion transactions annually, manages over one billion identities, and counts AT&T, Samsung, and AXA among its customers. "It has been an incredible journey building WSO2 over the past two decades," Weerawarana said in the announcement. "I am proud of what we have accomplished and confident in the team and strategy driving the company forward."
The board acknowledged the weight of the departure. Jonas Persson, chairman, described Weerawarana's tenure as having built WSO2 into "a globally recognised technology company," adding that the company was well positioned to continue its momentum given its current strategy and leadership team.
Weerawarana co-founded WSO2 alongside Paul Fremantle and Davanum Srinivas, drawing on nearly eight years at IBM Research, where he had worked on middleware innovation and helped shape core web services standards, including WSDL and BPEL4WS. The original thesis was straightforward: enterprises were overpaying for brittle, vendor-locked middleware, and an open-source alternative, built to work together rather than against them, could capture that market. The bet took time to pay off. Intel Capital committed $2m in 2006 as the earliest institutional backer, and the company raised $130m across six rounds over the following fifteen years, eventually bringing in Goldman Sachs for a $90m Series E in 2021.
The financial profile that emerged was unusual for a VC-backed software company. WSO2 was cash-flow positive from 2017 and profitable from around 2018, operating without the runway-burning growth strategies that characterised many of its peers. By the time EQT came calling, WSO2 was on track to hit $100m in annual recurring revenue — a scale EQT described as unique among enterprise technology companies originating from Asia.
EQT acquired WSO2 in May 2024 at a valuation of more than $600m. The deal was notable not only for its scale but also for how the proceeds were structured: nearly 30% of the total went to current and former employees, reflecting Weerawarana's long-standing position that every employee should be a shareholder. Angel investors exited at more than 50 times their original investment.
Under EQT's ownership, WSO2 has expanded beyond its API and identity management roots. The company acquired API analytics startup Moesif in May 2025, and has been repositioning around the agentic enterprise — the management, governance and security layer for AI-driven workflows operating across complex enterprise environments. The company now generates over $100m in annual recurring revenue and operates across offices in the US, UK, UAE, India, Sri Lanka, Australia, Brazil, Germany, and Spain.
Weerawarana will appear alongside the WSO2 leadership team at the WSO2Con North America conference in Austin, Texas next week, where the company is expected to outline its product direction under the incoming structure. The board has given no timeline for the permanent CEO appointment.
