Kusal
de Silva.

The pitch is small and specific. When a customer files a support ticket about why their pipeline broke at 3:14 a.m. on a Wednesday, the answer is rarely on the first page of a help doc. It is buried in a Jira comment from 2022, a Slack thread from last quarter, a tribal habit that one engineer happens to remember. AptEdge wants to be the layer that finds it. Kusal de Silva is the CEO making that bet.

He took the AptEdge job in 2025 with a position that is almost rude in its plainness. He is not selling the fastest chatbot. He is not promising to deflect 80% of tickets and call it a quarter. He keeps repeating, in podcasts and posts, that the priority is the right answer, even when the right answer takes longer to arrive. In a market addicted to demo metrics, that is a strange thing to lead with.

It is also, if you have ever filed a ticket and gotten three useless auto-replies, the only thing worth leading with.

AptEdge was founded in 2021 by Aakrit Prasad, who had spent years inside Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and Cisco watching support teams drown in fragmented knowledge. The thesis was clear from day one: connect the systems, surface the answer, augment the engineer. By 2025 the company had raised roughly $12.9 million, signed customers like Sumo Logic, CyberArk, Boomi, Everbridge, Cority, and Trintech, and reached the moment where the founder kept building the product and a long-tenured operator took over the wheel. De Silva is that operator.

He did not arrive accidentally. He grew up multilingual, speaks Sinhalese, picked up the work ethic that Cornell economics majors are quietly known for, and went straight from undergrad into the trenches: corporate and investment banking at Citigroup, then a co-founded venture called First Solutions Technology, then thirteen years climbing inside Meltwater — from new business sales floor to Senior Area Director, Enterprise Americas. Somewhere in the middle of that run he tucked in an executive stint at Oxford's Saïd Business School, the kind of credential people use when they want to keep their options open and their analysis sharp.

Thirteen years inside one company is the part of the resume that probably matters most. It is not the prestige stop. It is the patience. Anyone who has scaled enterprise sales for over a decade has watched a hundred shiny tools get killed by the same problem: they did not survive the customer's reality. De Silva is now CEO of a company whose product lives inside that reality.

He has been clear about who AptEdge is competing against and how. The big platforms — Salesforce, ServiceNow, the AI suites you already know — will keep launching support copilots that handle the easy questions. AptEdge wants the messy ones. The position is underdog by design. The hiring filter, in his own words, is acumen, grit, and character. Not pedigree. Not pattern matching.

The technical story matters too, because if you ignore it the company sounds like a thousand other AI startups. AptEdge ingests support tickets, internal documentation, product telemetry, and historical resolutions, then uses retrieval-augmented generation to draft answers, cluster similar cases, identify the root issue behind a wave of complaints, and auto-write knowledge articles for the next time it happens. The numbers the company points to are not headline-shaped: 40% faster resolution, 67% faster ramp-up for new support hires, 99% customer satisfaction. They are operations metrics for operations buyers. That is a feature, not a bug.

It also helps explain why a sales-trained CEO is the right fit. AptEdge does not win because of a model breakthrough. It wins because someone explains, in detail, to a head of customer support at a 4,000-person SaaS company, exactly how the workflow changes, where the integrations plug in, and what the engineers will stop hating about Mondays. That is not a research conversation. That is a sales conversation. De Silva has been having that conversation for two decades.

He carries personal stories that do not fit the template. Colleagues describe him as “well traveled, highly intelligent, motorcycle riding, professional ballroom dancer.” He cooks. He has young triplets at home, a fact he mentioned in a Father's Day post with the matter-of-fact tone of someone for whom chaos is now the baseline. The combination — sales operator, hobbies that require unusual physical timing, three babies, AI startup — reads less like a brand and more like a person whose calendar should not work but somehow does.

The story arc from here is straightforward in the way good stories are. AptEdge is small. The incumbents are large. The market AptEdge is targeting — the technical support layer of enterprise B2B software — is one of those places where everyone agrees the experience is bad and almost no one has fixed it. De Silva's job is to make sure the fix arrives before someone bigger gets bored of chatbots and decides to copy his playbook.

So far the playbook reads like this. Focus on the hard tickets. Sell to the engineers, not the dashboards. Hire for grit. Quote support leads instead of analysts. Resist the urge to declare victory at deflection.

Whether it works is a 2027 question. Whether it deserves to is already answered.