Story

Chamira Jayasinghe's story does not begin in a boardroom. It begins in Kottawa, on the outskirts of Colombo, where a boy came home from school, dropped his bag, and ran to the paddy fields — to play in them, and to work in them.

There were no private tuition classes. No hothousing. His childhood was, in his own words, stress-less — an unhurried Sri Lankan boyhood of open skies and open time. It turned out to be the perfect training for a polymath. He captained his school cricket team. He played chess at university level. He performed as a street magician. He repaired laptops for pocket money. Long before anyone used the word, Chamira was learning the discipline that would define his career: mastering completely different systems — a spin bowler's field, a chess endgame, a sleight of hand, a motherboard — and finding the pattern that runs through all of them.

Then, at fourteen, life handed him its hardest problem. His father — Sarath Indrapriya Jayasinghe, a high-ranking government official — fell seriously ill. For two years, Chamira was at his side in hospital wards. Other boys his age were at cricket practice; he was in waiting rooms. So he did what he would do for the rest of his life: he turned the room he was in into a laboratory. In those hospital corridors, on borrowed time and borrowed machines, he taught himself low-level computer programming — the unforgiving world of registers, interrupts and memory addresses that most engineers never touch.

His father passed away when Chamira was sixteen. The grief became a build. He wrote an operating system from scratch and named it Project Indrapriya — his father's name, running at the heart of a machine. It remains the purest expression of who he is: when Chamira loves something, he engineers it into permanence.

The work was noticed. In 2007 he won Sri Lanka's Young Computer Scientist award and represented his country at APICTA in Singapore. The late Professor Gihan Wickramanayake took the young prodigy under his wing, training him in advanced assembly and C/C++. What followed was a torrent of teenage engineering: media players, chess engines, media servers, games — each one built from the metal up.

At the Sri Lanka Institute of Information Technology (SLIIT), Chamira graduated with First Class Honours — but the degree was almost a footnote to what he built there. Project Kadapatha turned large screens into multi-touch surfaces years before they were commonplace. Project Amma used EEG signals to analyse pre- and post-natal stress in mothers — work recognised by Microsoft. Project Kundalini went further still: a brain-signal-acquiring headset with a full software kit for processing, classifying and quantifying human emotion. Cricket captain, chess player, magician, and now a 20-something reading the human brain. Leonardo would have understood him perfectly.

It was at SLIIT, with five friends — Chinthaka, Mohan, Sasindu, Sahan and Imalka — that Chamira started Arimac as an incubation company. Their first major build set the tone for everything after: a media server that could time-shift entire live camera streams by ten minutes — genuinely hard, real-time systems engineering. It carried them into two to three years of work with local and international premier cricket leagues, collaborating with Singapore's Yolutube. A student startup from Colombo was quietly powering how the world watched live sport.

Then came the two weeks that changed everything. Arimac built a proof of concept for Emirates Airline in fourteen days — a pace so far outside the norm that Emirates' senior officials flew to Sri Lanka to study how it was done. What they found was Chamira's core operating system, the human one: take an intimidatingly large solution, decompose it into small, precise chunks, and run them in parallel until the impossible ships early. It is the same mind that captained the cricket field and played the chess board — see the whole game, then move many pieces at once.

That method scaled. Arimac grew from an incubation project into one of South Asia's most formidable digital powerhouses — hundreds of engineers across four continents, and a client roster including Visa, Emirates, Etihad, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nestlé, Unilever, Dialog and Ooredoo. Chamira led the company into massive Dubai-based transformation programmes, personally securing an eight-figure USD project portfolio in the Gulf. Along the way, Arimac built the things people said Sri Lanka couldn't build: Diyazen, South Asia's first humanoid robot. NIRO, the country's first stealth-action game, published to the world on Steam. imi, a MedTech-born gamification platform created with MBBS-qualified doctors. A United Nations global campaign for the Sustainable Development Goals that reached over 100 million people. And now AgentOS — an agentic AI operating system where autonomous software agents monitor, decide, alert and even pick up the phone and call engineers.

The honours followed: Fellow of the British Computer Society — the youngest ever appointed. Forbes Technology Council. National ICT Awards. Three-time NBQSA Young Entrepreneur of the Year. An APICTA record for the most awards ever won by a single company. Speaking invitations from Nice to Singapore.

But the résumé misses the point. The boy from the paddy field who lost his father and answered with an operating system; the teenager who learned machines at their lowest level in a hospital corridor; the student who read brainwaves and the founder who taught software to act — it has always been one continuous project. Chamira Jayasinghe builds machines that carry what he loves into the future. First it was his father's name. Now it is the digital future of every organisation bold enough to work with him.

The paddy field taught him patience. The hospital taught him purpose. The machines taught him power. He brings all three to the table.