Building Global Companies from Colombo: The Exit Interviews

At Disrupt Asia 2025, three Sri Lankan founders reflected on what it takes to build, scale, and sell a technology company from Colombo. In 2020, NCINGA, founded by Imal Kalutotage and Vijitha Abeywardena, was acquired by Zilingo for $15.5 million. At the time, it was Sri Lanka’s largest tech exit.

Four years later, the record was broken by WSO2, co-founded by Sanjiva Weerawarana and Paul Fremantle, when it was acquired by EQT for $600 million. The deal returned more than 50 times capital to early investors.

Sysco Labs, originally Leapset, followed a different path. Its founding team, including Mani Kulasooriya, oversaw a gradual acquisition by Sysco Corporation after a series of staged investments. These were not isolated outcomes. They marked the emergence of a credible path from startup to exit for Sri Lankan founders, based on intellectual property, not cheap labour.

What’s the Biggest Shift When Going from Founder to Investor?

After we raised money I was uncomfortable with how many questions they asked. I left IBM for freedom, and now I had investors being even tougher. I was thinking, “I didn’t start a company to deal with this.” But I was naive. No one had explained to me what life on the other side looked like. After exiting the company and becoming an investor myself, I started to understand. Investors often manage other people’s money. They have to be accountable and ask tough questions. As a founder, you need to respect that. Raising money is easy. Using it well is hard.

Why Is Breaking Even More Powerful Than Raising Money?

In 2015, our lead investor said they weren’t going to fund us anymore. Suddenly, we had no choice. In a single year, we went from losing $12 million to breaking even. That moment changed everything. When you don’t need to raise money, you realise the shareholders are no longer in control, management is. Until then, you depend on shareholders for every move. You need their support to raise, to grow, to survive. But once you become financially self-sustaining, the dynamic shifts. You’re no longer dependent. You’re no longer waiting for someone else’s approval to act. That’s what real independence looks like. So for me, the most interesting part of the journey was this shift. We reached a point where we could say, “We’re running this now,” and that changes the entire equation.

What Does AI Mean for the Future of Service Companies?

AI is going to change everything and at a much faster pace than any previous technology shift. In my mind, AI is a force multiplier. You can run a company as if it has 250 people while paying only 40 salaries, because each person delivers 5 times the output. Alternatively, you could have a 10-person team performing like a team of 40. This fundamentally shifts how we think about scale, structure, and cost. I believe there’s still room for services companies, but they won’t look like the ones we know today. They’ll need different business models and pricing structures to stay relevant.