In 2007, Jagath Wanninayake agreed to give a roomful of students something more interesting than a success story. He would bring them a business decision his company was actually facing. They could examine it, discuss it, and offer suggestions. The ending had yet to be written.
The occasion was Swarthmore’s Jonathan R. Lax Conference on Entrepreneurship. Wanninayake was running Clarix, the software company he had co-founded. A live case study put the audience in an unusual position: close enough to an operating business to consider its choices before hindsight tidied everything up. Business stories usually arrive with the answer circled. This one came with working space.
A year later, Phase Forward bought Clarix for $40 million in cash. That transaction could have supplied a perfectly serviceable ending. Wanninayake’s subsequent career took a less tidy route through investing, an independent record label, digital gifting, and another software company. Today he is founder and CEO of Suvoda. The interesting part is how often he has chosen to begin again.
Before the answer was obvious
A Sri Lanka native, Wanninayake studied economics at Swarthmore, with a concentration in public policy. He began his career in venture capital, working at Blue Rock Capital in Delaware. His early investment work covered enterprise software, e-commerce, and telecommunications. Before he was responsible for building a company, he was looking at businesses that wanted someone else to believe in them.
It is a useful apprenticeship for a founder. An investor encounters the confident forecast and the awkward assumption underneath it. An operator eventually has to make both meet payroll. Wanninayake crossed into that second job when he co-founded Clarix in 2002, becoming its chairman and chief executive.
Clarix began with three people and grew into an international business with operations in the United States and Europe. By the time of the sale, it had an established roster of large corporate customers. The acquisition announcement gave the price; the company’s development supplied the less photogenic achievement. A small team had become an organization another public company wanted to own.
The Swarthmore appearance belongs in this stretch of the story. Wanninayake had agreed to open an unresolved question to students while Clarix was still being built. It makes a more revealing career detail than a retrospective claim to have known the answer all along. Entrepreneurship involves decisions taken before certainty turns up, assuming it bothers to turn up at all.
A sale, then a different set of experiments
The September 2008 deal put Clarix inside Phase Forward. Wanninayake subsequently served as a corporate officer and member of its operating committee. Oracle acquired Phase Forward in 2010. His first company had moved into a much larger corporate structure, and his own experience now included life inside the buyer as well as life at the startup.
His ventures beyond enterprise software add some welcome variety to the chronology. He co-founded Jamity Records, an independent label that produced several albums. He also co-founded Mixette, a digital gifting startup associated with bringing the personal gesture of a mixtape into a digital setting. Somewhere between the board meeting and the product roadmap, there was room for a track list.
Those businesses should be allowed to remain distinct. A record label need not be a secret management seminar, and a gifting startup need not explain every later strategic choice. They do establish that Wanninayake’s entrepreneurial interests extended beyond one market. He has worked on businesses concerned with expression and giving, alongside the operational software for which he is better known.
He also became managing partner of Serendip Ventures, focused on seed-stage technology investments, and mentored other entrepreneurs. That placed him on several sides of the same conversation: the person asking for backing, the executive allocating resources, and the investor hearing a new pitch. Each position has a different relationship with the word “soon.”
Six people, and another beginning
Suvoda was founded in 2013. Its original team numbered six. Wanninayake returned to building a software business with colleagues whose experience included the earlier Clarix organization. Co-founder Robert Hummel, now chief operating officer, had worked at Clarix and Phase Forward. Starting again did not mean arriving without experience or without people who knew the work.
By 2017, Suvoda had 177 employees across the United States and Europe. That year, Wanninayake won the technology category of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year program for Greater Philadelphia. The award arrived four years into the company’s development, at a stage when its headcount already required rather more coordination than six people around a table.
Two years later, Suvoda employed 386 people in four offices, serving customers and end users in 62 countries. In December 2019, LLR Partners invested $40 million for a minority stake. It was Suvoda’s first institutional capital. The order matters: the organization had already become international before that investment arrived.
Howard Ross, one of LLR’s founding partners, joined the board. Wanninayake spoke about an investor he had known over the years and the experience and resources the relationship would bring. The financing was a new ingredient in an existing business. By then, he had both a previous exit and another growing company behind his conversations with investors.
Making room for the reluctant user
The numbers make a clean growth story. Wanninayake’s public thinking also gives considerable attention to people who are slower to embrace a new product. In a 2022 essay, he organized his approach around curiosity, empathy, and carefully chosen options. He treated resistance as a normal part of adoption, something a designer should investigate rather than dismiss.
His formulation is practical: “curiosity is the precursor to inclusivity.” A user who hesitates may be telling the builder something useful about the product, the workflow, or the cost of changing habits. That is a less theatrical starting point than assuming everyone simply needs a better demonstration.
For an enterprise software founder, this is a consequential choice of audience. The buyer can approve a purchase while the people doing the daily work still struggle with it. A successful sales conversation leaves another conversation to be had at the screen. Wanninayake’s emphasis on meeting different users at their own pace recognizes that distance.
There is a quiet connection to the unfinished case study at Swarthmore. In both settings, the person running the company leaves room for another perspective. The connection is an interpretation of his public record, rather than a claim about his private temperament. What he has chosen to discuss is revealing enough: decisions, adoption, and the work required to bring people with you.
“curiosity is the precursor to inclusivity.”Jagath Wanninayake · 2022
The next company is inside this one
In April 2025, Suvoda completed its merger with Greenphire. Wanninayake became chief executive of the combined company, which retained the Suvoda name. Greenphire continued as a product name. Thoma Bravo became lead strategic investor, with Bain Capital Tech Opportunities Fund and LLR Partners participating as minority investors.
A merger offers another version of beginning again. The businesses already exist; their people, systems, and expectations have to learn to operate together. The announcement promised a shared platform and simpler workflows. Delivering that promise requires work after the transaction has stopped being news.
Wanninayake’s September 2025 explanation of the combination concentrated on fragmentation: separate vendors, repeated data entry, multiple logins, and systems that do not communicate. His stated aim was to make information easier to reach and the tools easier to use. It is an ambition that can be tested in the ordinary experience of using software, one task at a time.
The leadership work continued in March 2026 with the appointments of Anuj Goswami as general counsel and chief privacy officer and Brian Greenfield as chief financial officer. Goswami had a long relationship with Suvoda as outside counsel and a founding board member. Greenfield brought experience from investor-backed technology businesses. Integration requires financial stewardship and governance as well as product plans.
Suvoda + Greenphire
One combined company. Wanninayake continues as CEO.An ambition measured in fewer clicks
Artificial intelligence has given Wanninayake another occasion to reconsider how work gets done. In a May 2026 conversation, he used the transition from steam power to electricity as an analogy for changing a whole operating process. The opportunity, in his telling, involves rethinking the arrangement of work when a different technology becomes available.
By September 30, 2026, Suvoda was announcing a platform release with eight connected products behind one login. Its conversational assistant, Sofia, supported permissioned actions in multiple languages, with actions logged and human sign-off retained. These were company-announced capabilities, and the distinction between a release announcement and everyday execution remains a useful one.
The direction is consistent with the operational questions he has been asking for years. How many systems must someone reconcile? How much information must be entered twice? How much effort goes into navigating the software before the actual work can begin? Those questions have the advantage of being comprehensible without a diagram of the underlying architecture.
There are public milestones enough for a conventional founder biography: an acquisition, awards, international expansion, institutional investors, a merger. Yet the 2007 classroom still offers a useful way into Wanninayake’s story. He brought an open decision to people who could question it. Nearly two decades later, his work still involves choices whose outcomes have to be earned. The next answer remains a work in progress. For the person responsible for the company, that means another decision, another conversation, and another day of building.