Sumir Karayi used to lose three to four hours a day getting to and from work. There are grander origin stories for a software company. Few are as easy to understand at seven in the morning. Before the investment deals, before the patents, before anyone needed an abbreviation for digital employee experience, there was a person looking at his working day and noticing how much of it had already gone.
He later connected those journeys to the idea behind 1E, the enterprise software business he co-founded in 1997. It is a useful place to begin because it puts a human inconvenience ahead of the machinery. Across his career, Karayi has returned to problems that respectable organisations learn to tolerate: computers consuming resources without earning their keep, employees waiting for their tools to work, and routines preserved because somebody once decided they were necessary.
His own brief account of his background is pleasantly economical: a move from the Himalayas to London, some things learned about software, an effort to give back through his foundation. An investor presentation would presumably require more slides. The compressed version has the advantage of leaving room for the person.
A busy machine can still be wasting your money
Karayi studied electronic engineering at the University of Warwick, followed by a master’s in information technology for manufacturing. His early working life involved computer networks at the BBC, Reuters and Lombard. At Lombard, he began developing tools to automate administration and saw how automation could reduce costs. These were practical encounters with the inside of large organisations, where a small repeated task can become a surprisingly expensive habit.
Microsoft followed. Then came 1E, founded with Phil Wilcock and Mark Blackburn, with Karayi starting the business from his flat in West Ealing. Even the name carried a little technical gallows humour: it came from a computer error message. Naming a company after the thing customers hope never to see again is a fairly direct declaration of intent.
By 2010, he was questioning how companies measured their computing. A server could appear heavily occupied and still contribute little of value. Maintenance and housekeeping might keep its processors busy without producing the work the business actually needed. His preferred test was whether the machine was doing something useful.
“We have a term we call ‘useful work’.”
Sumir Karayi, 2010
The distinction has a dry appeal. A blinking light is convincing theatre; a useful result requires more investigation. Karayi wanted organisations to examine what their computers were accomplishing, then reduce the electricity, equipment and effort spent on the rest. It was an engineering question with an accountant standing very close behind it.
An editorial illustration of the approach he described in 2010.
1999 called. Nobody was ready.
The inconvenient thing about seeing a possibility early is that customers can decline to share your timetable. In 1999, Karayi started OfficeOnTheNet to help businesses work remotely. Looking back, he gave a plain account of the problem: the technology functioned, but the market was unready.
That experience complicates the comforting version of entrepreneurship in which foresight is promptly rewarded. Sometimes the future arrives and discovers the purchasing department has other priorities. Karayi’s account allows a failed attempt to remain a failed attempt, with a lesson about timing attached.
Years later, he was still arguing that work should be judged by what people delivered. In 2020, he also described self-service software as a way for employees to get help whenever and wherever they were working. The convenience mattered. A service desk organised around its own availability could be a poor fit for someone trying to finish a task elsewhere.
By 2021, his argument extended to the tools themselves. A knowledge worker with unreliable equipment was being asked to produce good work with inadequate means. He compared the situation to a chef supplied with poor cookware and blunt knives. The analogy had the merit of making an IT budget briefly comprehensible to everyone who had ever tried to cut a tomato.
He wanted IT to help employees accomplish more. That involved a change of attitude as well as software: the person using a laptop had to become central to the discussion about how well the technology was performing. The inconvenience at the start of his own career had acquired a much larger audience.
The long route to a change of owners
Karayi grew 1E organically for more than twenty years. EY’s account of the business credits it with more than forty patents. That is a long period to spend developing technology, acquiring customers and learning how to run a company before the large outside investment appears in the story.
In June 2021, Carlyle acquired a majority stake. Karayi retained a significant minority interest, and part of the company remained employee-owned. The announcement said he would continue as CEO; later that year, Mark Banfield took over the role. The distinction matters in a career that now stretches well beyond the chief executive’s desk.
- 1E is founded.West Ealing, London
- Carlyle buys a majority stake.Karayi retains a minority interest
- TeamViewer agrees to acquire 1E.$720 million enterprise value
- The acquisition closes.31 January
In December 2024, TeamViewer agreed to acquire 1E at an enterprise value of $720 million. The transaction completed on 31 January 2025. By then, Carlyle described a business of around three hundred employees across the UK, US, India and Ireland. The flat had become a rather more complicated organisational arrangement.
Karayi’s response to the agreement put the team’s work at the centre. That was appropriate to a business whose later growth had been led by Banfield and his colleagues. A founder’s story becomes more accurate, and more interesting, when other people are allowed to appear in it.
His next activities include Ver3, a London family investment office established in 2025, where he is founder and principal. Its remit covers public and private investments and other assets, with an emphasis on long holding periods. After spending decades building one business, he has another setting in which patience can be put to work.
Three sunflowers, no camouflage
In April 2014, Karayi ran the London Marathon with Will Edmondson and Nick Milne-Home, two fellow 1E executives. They wore sunflower costumes. For people accustomed to making technology work quietly in the background, it was a conspicuous change of approach.
The three finished in four hours and sixteen minutes. Their fundraising for the British Association for Adoption and Fostering reached £20,000, including matching funds from 1E, against a £15,000 target. Karayi was running his second London Marathon and improved his previous time by fifteen minutes. The flowers, apparently, were reasonably aerodynamic.
The costume choice carried a purpose: drawing attention to children waiting for adoptive families. It is a concrete example of charitable work woven into the company’s life, involving colleagues, friends and a matching commitment from the business. It also supplies a welcome correction to the idea that an enterprise software biography must consist entirely of product names.
Making the next door easier to open
Karayi founded the Fair Chance Foundation and has supported work on educational opportunity. At Warwick, that support connects to research on the pathways young women take into higher education in Haryana, India. The project brought together law and education researchers, alongside partners in India, to examine the conditions surrounding educational choices.
His connection to Warwick therefore extends beyond the degrees on his biography. A university that helped train him became somewhere he could support work on who gets access to further study. The question is specific: what shapes the choices available to young women, and how can those choices become better informed?
He is also a patron of The SuperScalers and supports Angel Academe, which backs female-founded technology businesses. These activities follow women’s opportunities from education into company-building. They give a practical shape to the philanthropic ambitions he has described publicly.
At Boardwave, his work includes its AI committee and sessions for technology leaders considering how to use AI as their companies grow. He has also judged EY’s Entrepreneur Of The Year programme. The accumulated experience of building 1E now has an audience of people facing their own hiring, product and expansion decisions.
Some of his giving is more local, and more audible. In May 2026, Dave Fuller, a former employee of twenty-two years, celebrated a year of performances using a Nord Stage 4 keyboard at Worcester’s Music Spoken Here. Karayi’s donation had made the purchase possible. The result was a piece of shared equipment visiting musicians could actually use.
Dickens gets the last word
There is a pleasing complication in Karayi’s enthusiasm for fiction. He has written that many business books could be shortened without losing much, while good novels offer something different. He described reading a first edition of David Copperfield and admiring the empathy Dickens showed toward young David.
For someone occupied with automation, the interest is revealing. His response to the prospect of more capable AI included a defence of creativity and humanity. The engineer who spent years asking what computers were doing was also asking what people should preserve in themselves.
That brings the story back to the hours lost on the road. Recovering time leaves a choice about how to spend it. Karayi’s public life offers several answers: another technical problem, another founder’s question, an educational opportunity, a keyboard in a music club. And, occasionally, a long novel that would suffer terribly from being reduced to its action points.