Kris Canekeratne’s unfinished business

The first offices had already had other careers. Near Boston, a basement became a workplace for software engineers. In Colombo, rooms once used by Kris Canekeratne’s grandfather, a judge, accommodated another team. Six engineers in Massachusetts and ten in Sri Lanka were an early expression of an idea that would become Virtusa: talented people on opposite sides of the world could build something together, provided the work was worth their attention.

Canekeratne had noticed an odd waste of ability. On visits to South Asia, he saw capable engineers assigned to routine upkeep of other people’s computer systems. There was demand for the work, certainly. But he believed the talent could take on more demanding assignments. A business could offer clients fresh products and better software, while giving its engineers something more interesting to do on Monday morning.

The arrangement sounds straightforward after the fact. At the beginning, it required customers to trust a young company, a dispersed team and an unfamiliar proposition at once. The furniture was domestic. The ambition crossed oceans. In 1996, Canekeratne and his co-founders began testing whether that distance could become an advantage.

The competitor who learned to sell

Growing up in Colombo, Canekeratne had been an under-16 national champion in both golf and table tennis. These are sports with rather different relationships to silence, but both make it difficult to blame a committee for the score. He also served as his school’s student union president. Competition and responsibility arrived before a corporate title did.

He went to Syracuse University to study computer science, graduating in 1988. Tushara, his childhood sweetheart, studied mathematics and computer science in Britain. They married in Colombo in 1989 and began their working lives in New York. Their eventual business partnership joined two people who understood the technical work themselves.

At INSCI, where he was a founding team member in 1989 and later a senior vice president, Canekeratne worked on digital document systems. The problems were practical: how to make stored information accessible and useful. Fellow executive John Gillis noticed that the engineer also understood customers and brought him into the effort to win business. Gillis would become a Virtusa co-founder.

That combination matters in the kind of company they went on to build. Engineers must understand why a system behaves as it does; customers want to know what changing it will accomplish. Canekeratne’s career grew at the meeting point. A clever technical answer still had to survive a buyer’s questions.

Making a business out of doing less twice

Much of the outsourcing proposition was easy to explain: move work somewhere it could be done at lower cost. Canekeratne’s engineering background suggested another route. Build reusable foundations. Consolidate overlapping applications. Reduce the amount of software a customer has to maintain. Then adapt the common parts to the particular business.

Gillis described this as platforming: shared functionality underneath, with specific customizations above it. Its appeal depended on changing the work itself. An organization paying to support several systems that did similar things might gain more from simplifying them than from negotiating a cheaper hourly rate for their upkeep.

There was another calculation behind the choice. Canekeratne deliberately wanted a large market. An earlier experience had taught him that a successful company could remain small if its market was small. IT services offered room to grow, provided Virtusa could find a useful place within it.

By the early 2000s, the company was concentrating on industries with large consumer populations: financial services, communications and technology, and media and information. These businesses had substantial existing systems and customers whose expectations were changing. The combination gave Virtusa a continuing supply of difficult work. A bank’s software, like its paperwork, rarely becomes simpler through neglect.

Five minutes in London

In Canekeratne’s telling, one consequential sales meeting in 2007 nearly disappeared into London traffic. He was trying to secure a five-year, $200 million agreement with a large British telecommunications customer as Virtusa prepared to go public. A delayed flight and a slow cab left him arriving at 9:25 for a 9:00 appointment. The finance chief had another meeting at 9:30.

He explained what the agreement would mean to the business. The customer agreed to help; ten days later, the contract was signed. Canekeratne subsequently spent two hours recovering the luggage he had abandoned at the airport. The logistics were undignified. The commercial result was rather better.

Virtusa’s August 2007 offering sold 4.4 million shares at $14 apiece, a gross offering of $61.6 million. Its trading symbol was VRTU. Behind those compact figures lay eleven years of work, customer relationships and an organization that had outgrown its original rooms.

A stock exchange makes a useful milestone because it supplies a date and a price. It offers a less complete account of the people who made the business possible. Around that period, lead director Martin Trust was pushing Canekeratne to imagine a billion-dollar company, even before revenue had reached $100 million. Sometimes a board member’s most useful contribution is a larger question.

A bank branch in the palm of a hand

The next opening was already being carried around in customers’ pockets. Canekeratne paid close attention to younger consumers who expected banking and other services to work on their phones. A mobile service could no longer be treated as a decorative extra attached to the real business.

Virtusa helped JPMorgan Chase develop mobile banking, including the ability to deposit a check by photographing it. The task sounds modest when described from the customer’s side: take a picture, save a trip. From the bank’s side, making that simple action work meant joining a new interface to established systems. Such jobs were well suited to a company interested in both the screen and the machinery behind it.

By 2018, banking was also central to Canekeratne’s account of Virtusa’s opportunities. Established institutions faced competition from businesses built around digital services. His argument was that banks needed to rethink how they served customers while reducing the clutter underneath. The majority investment in Polaris, completed in 2016, expanded Virtusa’s capabilities in financial services.

Virtusa reached the billion-dollar annual revenue milestone in 2018. That December, TiE Boston recognized Canekeratne for leadership in business-to-business solutions. The original proposition had acquired considerable scale: engineering teams helping large institutions change how ordinary people encountered them.

Keeping the team larger than the ego

Growth introduced a problem that no reusable software component could settle. Canekeratne remembered knowing almost everyone by name until the company passed roughly 300 people. He wanted to preserve that sense of belonging as the organization spread. Quarterly video gatherings, shared financial information and town halls became ways to keep the conversation open.

He also described a specific rule for managers. When a project went well, credit belonged with the team. When it went badly, leaders should examine their own contribution. It is a sensible arrangement with one obvious inconvenience: the boss loses the customary right to enjoy every victory and outsource every defeat.

His appetite for competition remained visible. Virtusa used leaderboards to make engineering performance transparent, including productivity, quality and defects. Yet his advice about invention left room for judgment. “There is no prescription for innovation,” he said. Engineers needed the problem and the freedom to work out a solution, rather than instructions that reduced them to typing someone else’s answer.

There is a tension here worth keeping. Measurement can clarify expectations; it can also narrow attention to whatever earns points. Canekeratne’s stated approach asks managers to do both jobs: make standards visible and allow people to think. The quality of that balance is tested in everyday decisions, especially when an engineer’s proposed answer is inconvenient.

“There is no prescription for innovation.”

Kris Canekeratne, 2018

The next company has familiar questions

Baring Private Equity Asia completed its acquisition of Virtusa in February 2021, following an announced transaction valued at about $2 billion. Trading in VRTU ended. Canekeratne stepped away from the chairman and chief executive roles that year, with Santosh Thomas appointed as the incoming CEO in June. The business had reached roughly $1.3 billion in sales.

He had already helped build another enterprise software company, eDocs, co-founded in 1997 and later acquired by Siebel Systems, which became part of Oracle. His working life had repeatedly returned to the unglamorous but valuable business of making organizations function. Documents, bills, banking applications: useful software tends to have other people’s daily obligations attached to it.

By August 2026, Canekeratne was publicly identified as founder, CEO and chairman of Kaya Intelligence. Its approach to enterprise AI separates designing a process from repeatedly executing it. AI helps create an execution plan; approved plans then run consistently until a change requires revision. The company places governance and the ability to inspect what happened inside that process.

The continuity is striking. At Virtusa, he sought reusable engineering foundations instead of needless repetition. At Kaya, the proposition again concerns what should be designed carefully and what should then run dependably. The technology has changed; the customer still needs an answer that can survive an ordinary working day.

An earlier family joke now reads like a temporary ceasefire. After starting companies and having two sons, Canekeratne said, “We then stopped having children and stopped starting companies.” The second half, at least, has required revision. There are more engineers to assemble, more complicated systems to untangle, and another customer to persuade that a better way of working is worth the trouble.