Romesh Jayawickrama and the cost of a wasted introduction

A corporate deal can acquire a hundred pages before it acquires a reader. By 2025, Romesh Jayawickrama had become interested in that small professional absurdity: the confidential information memorandum, assembled with considerable effort, arriving in front of someone with considerably less time. He described documents running to 100 or 150 pages and a preparation process that could consume months. The attachment had become a project in its own right. Whether anybody absorbed it was another question.

For the founder associated with Aurigin, this was familiar territory. He had already spent years trying to improve what happened before an investor and a company met. Now, through Inttent, he was working on what happened when they had something substantial to say to each other. Put the two ventures beside each other and a career takes shape around the overlooked intervals in business: the search, the introduction, the explanation.

The banker who knew the bottleneck

Jayawickrama came to technology through finance. He studied economics and politics at the University of Bath between 1992 and 1996. His banking career included Nomura in London, ING Securities and CLSA, with leadership experience in London and Singapore. Before Aurigin, he also established Amura, a corporate finance and consulting firm focused on middle-market private equity and mergers and acquisitions.

He had experienced the machinery from inside large institutions and from a smaller advisory business. Changing the size of the office had not removed the difficulty. In 2015, he traced BankerBay to “many years of frustration.” Finding opportunities and getting the right information to the right potential investor still consumed people’s time. A banker could possess judgment, experience and relationships, yet remain limited by the hours available to search.

The attraction of software was practical. Repeated discovery work could be handled differently, leaving experienced professionals more time for the parts of a transaction that needed their expertise. His proposed change began with a task he knew. It is easier to identify an unnecessary chore when you have already done it rather too often.

An idea needs more than one origin story

The early BankerBay story also includes Ash Narain. In 2014, Narain described assembling a small team in his Delhi house and getting a beta ready in November 2013. Jayawickrama joined as a co-founder after seeing value in the idea. The combination matters: early product development on one side, a banker’s experience of the intended customer on the other.

A familiar founder narrative likes a single person, a single revelation and a suitably inconvenient room. The actual sequence here allows for collaboration. Narain had started building; Jayawickrama brought experience of how financial institutions found and distributed opportunities. A financial platform needed to make sense to people whose transactions would pass through it.

By June 2015, BankerBay was announcing more than $2 million in seed funding and a New York headquarters. Its named backers included David Toh of NTUitive and Scale.VC. The business had moved beyond an idea that bankers might find useful. It now needed to persuade them to put that usefulness into their working day.

The useful art of leaving things out

The intended customer was dealing with private companies and middle-market transactions. In his 2015 explanation, Jayawickrama described investment sizes between $10 million and $250 million. For such a user, a large collection of names would still leave a great deal of work undone. The value lay in narrowing the field to people whose investment requirements suited a particular opportunity.

BankerBay’s early design combined matching algorithms with transaction analysts who checked submissions. It also allowed members to retain control over disclosure, rather than exposing identities at the beginning of every possible conversation. That is a revealing product choice. An introduction in corporate finance involves information that its owner may have good reason to share selectively.

Filtering therefore did two jobs. It reduced the number of irrelevant possibilities, and it gave participants a process for moving toward a conversation. A match could earn further attention. It did not settle the commercial terms or make an investment decision for the people involved. There remained plenty for the banker to do after the software had found someone worth calling.

A global network still needs a local door

The company’s international ambitions came with offices and people. The June 2015 announcement placed its earlier offices in Singapore and Bangalore alongside the new New York base. In September 2017, it announced Shanghai operations, led by Chinese capital-markets executive Pin Li. Distribution required more than a website that could be opened abroad.

There is a pleasing tension in this chapter of Jayawickrama’s career. He wanted technology to extend the reach of relationships, while building a business that still needed representation in financial centers. Software could improve discovery across borders. People still had to introduce the software, explain its usefulness and understand the markets where it would be used.

In December 2019, BankerBay became Aurigin. The company reported more than 35,000 members and activity spanning over 145 countries. Jayawickrama described the ambition as “capital without borders.” Those historical figures express the breadth he was seeking. They also make the harder question more interesting: in a network that wide, how do you make the next introduction specific enough to matter?

Give the expensive people better work

By February 2020, Jayawickrama described a working rule at Aurigin: technology should handle roughly 80 percent of activity, with people responsible for the remaining 20 percent. As the technology improved, the work assigned to the team should become more valuable too. He presented the split as an operating principle, a way to question whether a process demanded too much manual involvement.

The idea has a useful consequence. Hiring another person cannot be the only answer to every repeated task. A growing business must also ask why the task takes that much effort. Otherwise the same difficulty returns with a larger payroll attached. For an entrepreneur with a banking background, the allocation of expensive expertise was part of the product’s logic.

In August 2020, Aurigin announced AiB, an enterprise solution intended to connect origination with execution workflows inside banks. Its proposed functions included preparing marketing materials, populating data rooms and routing capital requirements between relevant divisions. The scope had widened from finding a counterparty to coordinating more of the work around a corporate client.

These were product ambitions, rather than a claim that software could conduct every negotiation. They show where Jayawickrama kept directing his attention: toward work that sat between the experienced professional and the decision that professional was being paid to make.

“Effective delegation.”

Romesh Jayawickrama’s answer to a question about personal productivity, 2017

His own productivity advice was correspondingly brief. When asked in 2017, he recommended delegation. His advice on networking was more expansive: curiosity about other people, their stories, companies and products. Both answers fit the business he was building. Spend attention deliberately, and take an interest in what the person on the other side is actually trying to accomplish.

The next obstacle was an attachment

The path to Inttent began with a problem encountered in his earlier venture. In a Blue Startups founder spotlight, Jayawickrama explained that an ecosystem of institutions could still communicate through cumbersome documents. Connecting the participants had exposed another difficulty. Once the conversation began, the material carrying it could be awkward to create and unrewarding to read.

One2Four and its Inttent product emerged from that observation. The proposed alternative brought video, charts, navigation and interaction into corporate information, alongside tools for understanding reader engagement. A business could then consider how its material was being used, rather than treating the act of sending a file as the end of communication.

The distinction is easy to recognize outside finance. An author knows why a particular chart matters. A recipient may arrive with a different question and head straight for another section. A document that accommodates that behavior can be useful without requiring everyone to follow the author’s preferred route through every page.

For Jayawickrama, the change of product carried forward an old concern. At Aurigin, information helped determine whether two parties should meet. At Inttent, the presentation of information helped determine what they could understand after the meeting had become possible. The work followed the transaction into its next room.

A second venture, a different audience

Inttent brought him into Hawaii’s startup community and Blue Startups’ portfolio. In January 2025, he was named a finalist for the state’s Tech Entrepreneur of the Year recognition alongside Randy Marsden of Skidattl and Jason Sharp of Umi. Sharp won the award. Jayawickrama’s finalist place marked a public milestone for the newer venture.

That March, he described Inttent’s use of source files to generate corporate text and charts. He said preparation that could take 400 hours might instead take three or four. It was his account of the product’s potential, rather than a universal benchmark. The document remained a business argument that somebody had to understand. Faster assembly was one part of the ambition.

The career that began in investment banking had reached a question any busy reader could appreciate: why expend so much effort making information that asks for more attention than its recipient can give? Jayawickrama’s ventures approach that question at different stages of a deal. Find a suitable person. Give that person something useful to consider. Leave room for the conversation that follows.