Somos, Inc. has named Shannon Donohue as its new chief technology officer, adding a familiar face to the executive leadership team at a company most Americans have never heard of despite relying on its infrastructure every time they place a phone call or send a text message. Headquartered in East Brunswick, Somos serves as the federally designated administrator overseeing how phone numbers are assigned, tracked, and increasingly verified as trustworthy across the entire North American telecommunications system, work that touches more than seven billion phone numbers in use across the United States, Canada, and parts of the Caribbean.

A Promotion Rooted in an Existing Relationship

Donohue’s appointment is notable in part because it is not a cold hire. She joined Somos’s Advisory Board back in February 2025 while serving in a product leadership role at Telesign, giving the company more than a year of direct exposure to her thinking on communications trust and connectivity before bringing her on in a full executive capacity. Gina Perini, Somos’s chair of the board and chief executive, framed the move as a natural extension of that existing relationship, saying Donohue had already established herself as a trusted voice for the company through her advisory work and describing her deep expertise across global communications platforms as invaluable heading into the next phase of the company’s strategy.

Most recently, Donohue served as vice president of global connectivity and operations at Vonage, the Ericsson owned communications platform company, where she oversaw the foundational infrastructure supporting Vonage’s CPaaS and network API products, essentially the plumbing that lets businesses build calling, messaging, and verification features directly into their own software. Earlier in her career, she held leadership roles at EZ Texting, Telesign, and Proximus Global, building a track record specifically centered on scaling connectivity platforms and guiding organizations through growth and technology integration rather than any single narrow specialty.

Why a Company Almost Nobody Has Heard Of Matters This Much

Somos operates as something like the supreme clearinghouse for how phone numbers function across an entire continent, a role that becomes clearer once its core responsibilities are broken down individually.

Beyond that core registry work, Somos has spent recent years building out a suite of anti fraud and identity verification tools aimed at the problem of scam and spoofed calls specifically. Its RealNumber DNO service helps block scammers from hijacking inbound only numbers to impersonate institutions like the IRS or a bank’s customer service line, while RealAgent screens numbers to help enterprises stay compliant with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act before they auto dial or text a customer. A third tool, RealBrand, allows legitimate businesses to display verified caller ID branding on a recipient’s phone, giving consumers a visual signal that an incoming call is safe to answer rather than another spoofed nuisance call.

A Leadership Change Ahead of a Bigger Industry Push

Donohue’s arrival comes as Somos continues expanding its broader trust and fraud prevention efforts, including a recent addition to its Advisory Board of Melissa Blassingame, Twilio’s telecom trust leader, adding further outside expertise to the company’s push against robocall networks. That effort is set to take center stage this November, when Somos hosts its annual Somos Summit in Washington, D.C., an industry gathering the company has said will focus heavily on how artificial intelligence can be deployed to identify and shut down robocall operations before they reach consumers.

As chief technology officer, Donohue will now be responsible for translating that broader strategic push into Somos’s actual technology roadmap, a role the company has described as central to strengthening its platforms and expanding its ability to deliver identity verification and trust infrastructure across the global communications ecosystem. For a company whose work rarely makes headlines despite underpinning nearly every phone call and text message sent across the continent, the appointment marks a deliberate bet that continuity, built on someone who already understood the company’s strategy from the boardroom, will serve its next phase of growth better than an outside hire starting from scratch.