Principals: The Boardroom
How Lakmini Wijesundera Sold Governance Software to Forty Countries from Colombo
A Sri Lankan engineer educated at UCL and Imperial College built a board management platform that now serves Fortune 500 companies across five continents.
Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | April 2026
Board management software is not glamorous. It sits in a category that venture capitalists rarely chase and technology journalists rarely cover. It is also, when executed well, extraordinarily defensible: once a corporation’s board runs on your platform, switching costs are prohibitive, security requirements create regulatory moats, and the client relationship extends to the most senior people in the organisation. Lakmini Wijesundera understood this before most of her competitors did.
London Training, Colombo Building
Wijesundera studied computer science and electronics engineering at University College London, then earned a master’s degree from Imperial College. She returned to Sri Lanka’s nascent technology sector — a spell at Ceycom Global Communications, then a role leading information technology and software development at Lanka Bell — before co-founding IronOne Technologies and BoardPAC in 2006 with Sanje Widyaratne.
IronOne, headquartered in Austin, Texas, with engineering in Colombo, became the broader technology group — providing AI, machine learning, and mobile solutions to Fortune 500 clients. BoardPAC was the product that emerged from it: a secure, centralised platform for board meeting automation — document management, encrypted communication, e-signatures, voting, and real-time collaboration, all built to the standards that corporate boards and regulators require.
Tony Weerasinghe — the serial entrepreneur who founded MillenniumIT and built the matching engines now used by the London Stock Exchange — joined as a strategic adviser, bringing credibility and connections that would prove valuable as BoardPAC expanded internationally.
Forty Countries, Five Continents
The expansion was methodical. Asia Pacific first — Sri Lanka, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, India, Australia, Indonesia. Then Africa — South Africa, Kenya, Rwanda — where BoardPAC won contracts with stock exchanges, state-owned enterprises, and listed conglomerates including Mercedes-Benz South Africa, Deloitte, and Sasria. Then the Americas and Europe. Nine offices across five continents.
The client base now exceeds fifty thousand users across more than forty countries. BoardPAC has established a leading market position in board management automation across the Asia Pacific region. The company achieved ISO 27001 certification — the international standard for information security management — and has maintained carbon-neutral certification for four consecutive years.
BoardPAC launched QME AI — described as the world’s first AI chatbot designed specifically for board members, enabling directors to query board documents within a secure environment during meetings — a convergence of enterprise AI and corporate governance that few competitors have attempted.
The Numbers and the Recognition
BoardPAC generates approximately $26.5 million in annual revenue with a team of around 110 people. The company is bootstrapped: no external venture capital, no private equity. Growth has been funded from operations.
Wijesundera’s recognition has been proportionate to the achievement. SAARC Woman Entrepreneur of the Year in 2019 — the overall winner, not a category award. First Sri Lankan entrepreneur selected for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneurial Winning Women programme in Asia Pacific. Female Exporter of the Year from Sri Lanka’s National Chamber of Commerce. Echelon magazine named her among the fifty most powerful women in business. The awards continue to accumulate, but the more telling metric is the client list: corporations and government bodies across forty countries do not adopt governance software based on awards. They adopt it based on security, reliability, and the willingness of a vendor to support them at board level across time zones.
What the Story Tells
BoardPAC complicates the narrative of Sri Lankan technology in a specific way. This is not an outsourcing firm that grew into a product company. It was a product company from inception — built to sell a proprietary platform to the most security-conscious buyers in the most regulated environments on earth. The fact that it was built from Colombo, by a bootstrapped team, and now operates across five continents is not incidental. It is the point.
Wijesundera has served on the board of ICTA — Sri Lanka’s Information and Communication Technology Agency — and serves on the National AI Committee, contributing to the policy frameworks that will shape the next generation of Sri Lankan technology companies. The pattern, again, is consistent with the other founders in this series: build the company, then build the ecosystem.
But there is an additional dimension. Wijesundera built BoardPAC in an industry and a region where women founders remain rare — particularly in enterprise software, particularly selling to boards of directors. She did not build a company for women. She built a company that happens to be led by one, in a domain where that distinction still carries weight. The understatement is intentional. The achievement speaks for itself.
Sources:
BoardPAC: https://boardpac.co/about-us/
Daily FT, “EY includes IronOne Technologies’ Lakmini Wijesundera in Entrepreneurial Winning Women program”: https://www.ft.lk/article/621790/EY-includes-IronOne-Technologies--Lakmini-Wijesundera-in-Entrepreneurial-Winning-Women-program
PRMinds, “Meet Sri Lankan Woman Technopreneur Lakmini Wijesundera”: https://prminds.lk/news/meet-sri-lankan-woman-technopreneur-lakmini-wijesundera-founder-and-executive-director/
The Island, “BoardPAC achieves carbon neutral certification for the fourth consecutive year”: https://island.lk/boardpac-achieves-carbon-neutral-certification-for-the-fourth-consecutive-year/
IronOne Technologies: https://www.irononetech.com/about-us
Sri Lanka Business, “BoardPAC successfully establishes footprint in Africa”: https://www.srilankabusiness.com/news/boardpac-successfully-establishes-footprint-in-africa.html
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. All decisions should be made based on independent research and consultation with qualified advisors.
About Saint Clair: Saint Clair designs and builds cross-border capital infrastructure between Europe and Asia — proposing access where access is scarce, and creating structure where structure is absent. Saint Clair Asia (saintclair.asia) is a frontier investment platform that positions international investors within innovation ecosystems that institutional channels do not reach.
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