
He helped build Virtusa by giving engineers harder problems to solve. Three decades after its founding, Kris Canekeratne is applying a familiar discipline to a new problem: making enterprise AI dependable.
He returned to Sri Lanka, co-founded WSO2 and helped turn open-source software into a $600 million business. After handing over the CEO role in May 2026, Sanjiva Weerawarana is putting more time into the institutions he built beyond it.

A hotel concierge product was the original idea. The work on the side became Fcode Labs’ main business - and gave its co-founder a different education in building a company.

A cricket broadcast opened the door. Games, robots and AI followed. Behind Arimac’s varied ambitions is Chamira Prasad Jayasinghe’s persistent question: what would give Sri Lankan talent a reason to build at home?

Fcode Labs’ co-founder and co-CEO started in a room in his family home. Today, his public writing examines hiring, feedback, and how to give remote engineering teams room to think.

Zyner began with two laptops, months without a client and midnight calls from Colombo. Sehan Sanjula’s real product was not another design package - it was a way to make creative work arrive without the chase.
Neschae Fernando is the CEO of Zone24x7, a 22-year-old technology engineering company headquartered in San Jose, California, with a major hub in Sri Lanka. With a dual background in electrical engineering (MS and BS from UCLA) and enterprise IT delivery at Cisco, Fernando leads a 270-person team that sits at a rare intersection: companies capable of integrating hardware and software end-to-end. Under his leadership since June 2022, Zone24x7 has won seven industry awards in 2025 alone, including Gold at NBQSA and the IoT Technology of the Year Award, while expanding its AI, RFID, and cognitive vision platforms across 50+ enterprise clients globally.

Chamath Palihapitiya is a Sri Lankan-Canadian-American venture capitalist, founder of Social Capital, and co-host of the All-In Podcast. A former VP of User Growth at Facebook who helped scale the platform from 50M to 700M+ users, he left to build one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive investment firms. Known for contrarian takes, a welfare-to-billionaire origin story, and pioneering the 'growth hacking' playbook, he now manages $2.147B in AUM while running a top-ranked Substack newsletter and co-hosting one of tech's most listened-to podcasts.