Sri Lanka isn’t synonymous with world class tech. But that might be about to change.

Photo credit: Miltos Gikas.

During the years Mustafa Kassim left Sri Lanka to attend college in California, he lost touch with what was happening back home. “I wasn’t able to read about the things I found important,” he reminisces. The media sites that he was able to access were traditional. He describes them as press release machines, often wildly biased toward one side of the teardrop-shaped island’s wide political spectrum.

When he returned to Sri Lanka a few years later, he decided to start his own media publication. In July 2014, Roar was launched with funding from his family. Today, it claims 200,000 visitors a month with 150,000 unique views. 75 percent of those readers are from within the island itself, and the other quarter come from countries with a significant Lankan diasporic presence, like the United Kingdom and the United States.

The site primarily publishes articles in English. Three months ago, it launched content in Sri Lanka’s majority language, Sinhalese. If there’s enough interest, they’re also considering publishing in the island’s minority language, Tamil – members of the two groups spent nearly 26 years fighting each other in one of history’s bloodiest wars that ended in 2009.

“People might be surprised at the advancements in digitization in Sri Lanka.

Mustafa’s mission is simple – he wants to find a way to magnify the important, often overlooked aspects of Sri Lanka’s evolving culture and make it accessible to readers across the globe. “The original intent was to make this for expat Sri Lankans,” he says.

In a way, that’s the same mission that’s being pursued by the recently launched BOV Capital.

It’s a US$15 million venture capital fund for early-stage Sri Lankan startups. It has three partners – one is Rajan Anandan, who’s a Sri Lankan native and the vice president of Google Southeast Asia and India. The other two are Prajeeth Balasubramaniam, who also heads the Lankan Angel Network and Blue Ocean Ventures, and conservation biologist Eric Wikramanayake.

The startups they invest in have a few basic criteria, Prajeeth says. They need to have strong teams and products that fit appropriately in the market.

Most importantly, they should have the ability to take the companies they’re creating on the island and scale them to serve the world.

“We’re still talking about tea and other exports,” says Prajeeth, “but I believe that we have enough human capital to disrupt the world’s businesses and do things in new ways.”

Outward in

Despite years of turmoil, Sri Lanka has managed to produce its fair share of tech gems.

One is Millennium IT, an IT services firm headquartered in the capital city of Colombo. In 2005, it was contracted to create an automated equity, ETF, and options-trading system for the American Stock Exchange. In 2009, it was acquired by the London Stock Exchange.

Then, there’s WSO2, an open-source middleware company that Prajeeth explains would have been a great fit for BOV Capital if they were investing four or five years ago.

Growing pains