A studio that started in a Colombo bedroom in 2011 now engineers software for Emirates and Etihad, and built Sri Lanka's first humanoid robot. The through-line is a refusal to pick a single lane.
In June 2018, on a stage borrowed from Google's developer conference in Colombo, Chamira Jayasinghe told a room full of engineers that his company would build Sri Lanka a humanoid robot. It was the kind of promise that usually ages badly. A year later, a robot called Diyazen - with a face modeled on the carved Raksha masks of Sri Lankan folklore - was standing up. That gap between a bold claim and a working machine is a decent way to understand Arimac Digital: it treats "we can't build that here" as a premise to be tested, not accepted.
Arimac is, on paper, a digital agency. That description undersells it. Founded in 2011, the company writes enterprise software, trains AI models, produces 3D and VFX, ships video games, runs augmented-reality campaigns, and - occasionally - engineers robots. Most firms this varied are a holding company with a logo. Arimac runs it all as one shop of roughly 400 people, headquartered in Sri Lanka with an office in Dubai and business records that also point to Sydney.
The core business is straightforward: companies hire Arimac to design and build digital products they can't or won't build in-house. That covers the unglamorous middle of modern software - a bank's mobile app, an airline's loyalty program, a telecom's self-service portal - plus the flashier edges of immersive tech and robotics. Arimac groups this into a handful of practices: enterprise and product engineering, AI and automation, immersive computing, a creative studio for design and VFX, game development, and fintech platforms.
The work that gets noticed tends to be the loyalty and airline software. Arimac built the Etihad Guest app, which won a gold trophy for innovation, and the Ooredoo YOOZ app, which took a silver. Its work for Peoples Bank was named Best Digital Bank Sri Lanka in 2024. The pattern is consistent: consumer-facing apps for very large organizations that need them to work at national scale.
Arimac's client list reads like a departures board crossed with a bank lobby. Emirates, Etihad and Du on the aviation and telecom side; Visa and Peoples Bank in finance; Coca-Cola, Tesco, Nestle and Ooredoo in consumer. The company says it serves more than 180 clients across 11-plus countries, and that products it has built have reached over 330 million users - a figure larger than the population of the United States.
The turn toward the Gulf was deliberate. Arimac opened in Dubai in 2016 and used it as a beachhead into tier-one regional accounts. That geography now drives a meaningful share of the work: airlines and banks in the UAE and wider Middle East, served by engineering teams sitting largely in Sri Lanka.
The problem Arimac sells against is a gap between ambition and capacity. A regional airline wants an app as slick as anything from a Silicon Valley team, but doesn't want to staff a 100-person product org to get it. A bank needs to digitize before a competitor does. Arimac's pitch is that it can deliver that engineering quality from a lower-cost base, with the multi-disciplinary range to handle design, build and the occasional AR or robotics flourish under one contract.
There's a quieter argument underneath it too: that top-tier software does not have to come from the usual zip codes. The Etihad app was engineered in Sri Lanka. For a founder trying to prove that talent is evenly distributed even when opportunity isn't, that's the whole thesis in one product.
Most agencies are told to specialize. Arimac did the opposite and made breadth its identity. A single client can get software engineering, a brand film from the creative studio, an AR activation and a data-analytics layer without leaving the building. That range is hard to copy - not because any one piece is unique, but because assembling all of them under one roof, at quality, is rare.
The Diyazen robot is the clearest signal of this instinct. A pure services firm has no commercial reason to build a humanoid. Arimac built one anyway, gave it a face drawn from local mythology, and used it as proof that the team could take on deep, unfamiliar engineering. The robot was pitched for practical jobs - bill payments, SIM swaps, routine counter service - but its real function was reputational: it said the studio was not just assembling other people's technology.
Headcount and user counts are easy to inflate. The figure that's harder to fake is retention, and Arimac cites a 96% client retention and referral rate. In a services business, that number is the scoreboard: it means clients keep coming back and telling others. It's a more honest signal of whether the work is good than any award shelf - and Arimac has a full shelf too.
The business runs on B2B services - project fees and retainers for building and maintaining digital products. That's a proven, cash-generative model, and third-party data providers peg Arimac's annual revenue in the tens of millions, with a Series B raise recorded around 2019. The trade-off is familiar for agencies: services scale with headcount, not software margins.
The robotics and immersive work looks like an attempt to break that ceiling - to develop intellectual property Arimac owns rather than time it bills. Whether Diyazen and its AI efforts ever become a product line or stay as calling cards is the open question that will decide if the "digital unicorn" line is marketing or a forecast.
Arimac competes in a crowded field. In Sri Lanka it sits alongside firms like WSO2, 99X, Sysco LABS and Virtusa; regionally and globally it bumps into every digital-transformation consultancy and offshore dev shop pitching the same enterprise buyers. Its differentiation isn't a single technology - it's the combination of engineering, creative and emerging-tech under one brand, sold from a cost base that undercuts Western agencies.
The recognition has followed. Co-founder Chamira Jayasinghe was named UAE's Sri Lankan IT Personality of the Year in 2024 and honored as an "Iron Personality" at the inaugural Pannaraya awards. For a company that has spent 15 years arguing that South Asia can produce world-class digital products, the awards are less the point than the client list that earned them.
For a studio that began by promising a robot most people didn't believe it would build, Arimac's next act is the harder one: turning a reputation for range into something that compounds. The apps and the awards are done. The question the company keeps asking itself - out loud, in its own slogan - is whether design that disrupts can also, eventually, own the thing it built.