Principals: The Landlord
How Jeevan Gnanam Gave Sri Lanka’s Tech Sector a Place to Work
A third-generation industrialist converted sixteen acres of family land in Colombo into the country’s largest IT park, then built the coworking space that won a global award, then extended into AI. The through-line is infrastructure — physical, institutional, and now digital
.Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | May 2026
Every technology ecosystem needs physical space. Not the metaphorical kind — the literal kind. Office buildings where engineers can sit. Incubation hubs where startups can afford rent. Data centres where servers can run. The absence of this infrastructure is, in many emerging markets, the binding constraint: the talent exists, the ideas exist, but there is nowhere to put them. Jeevan Gnanam’s contribution to Sri Lanka’s technology sector begins with the most elemental of acts — providing a building.
The Family and the Land
The Gnanam family story is itself a study in what is possible in Sri Lanka, and what it costs. Jeevan’s grandfather, A.Y.S. Gnanam — later honoured with the title Deshamanya — arrived from Tamil Nadu in the 1930s and built what would become one of Sri Lanka’s largest industrial conglomerates. St. Anthony’s Group, spanning cement, PVC, roofing, textiles, solar, and hydropower, was a first-generation achievement in a country where Tamil entrepreneurs navigated complexities that their Sinhalese counterparts did not face. That the family built what it built, where it built it, is not a footnote. It is context.
Jeevan is the third generation. He studied economics and business in the United States before returning to Sri Lanka in 2007 to lead St. Anthony’s Industries, modernising the family business while scanning for the opportunity that would become his own.
He found it in a gap. Sri Lanka’s IT sector was growing, but it had nowhere to grow into. Office space for technology companies was scarce, expensive, and inadequate. Jeevan persuaded the St. Anthony’s board to allocate sixteen acres of underutilised family land on Baseline Road in Colombo for an IT park. The board’s initial reaction was scepticism. The land was generating revenue from existing industrial use. Betting it on a technology park — in a country where technology parks did not yet exist — was, by the standards of a manufacturing conglomerate, speculative.
Orion City
The bet paid. Orion City, launched in 2007 with thirty thousand square feet of office space, has grown to one million square feet. The campus now houses more than forty international technology companies — Virtusa, IFS, Synopsys, among others — and employs more than eight thousand people on site. Orion Towers, a twenty-two-storey expansion with LEED Gold certification, added half a million square feet of additional capacity.
Virtusa was the anchor tenant — a validation that attracted others. The economics were straightforward: a purpose-built technology campus, at competitive rates, in central Colombo, with the infrastructure that international firms required. The combined revenue generated by the Gnanam group’s technology and industrial operations exceeds $55 million. But the more consequential figure is the eight thousand people who come to work there every day. Orion City did not create the talent. It created the place where the talent could be employed at scale.
Hatch
When Gnanam became chairman of SLASSCOM — Sri Lanka’s IT industry body — in 2018, he identified a second gap. Orion City served established firms. Startups needed something different: affordable space, mentorship, access to investors, and the density of peers that accelerates learning. In 2018, he co-founded Hatch with Brindha Selvadurai-Gnanam and Nathan Sivagananathan — a sixty-thousand-square-foot coworking and incubation space in Colombo Fort, later expanded with a branch in Jaffna.
Hatch now houses over 115 startups and more than a thousand individuals. It runs eighteen incubator and accelerator programmes, including AccelerateHER — Sri Lanka’s first accelerator for female founders, in partnership with the US Department of State — and HatchX, the country’s first fintech accelerator, launched with the Lankan Angel Network and the Ford Foundation.
In 2021, Hatch won Best Co-Working Space in the World at the Global Startup Awards — the first South Asian organisation to receive the honour, selected from eighteen thousand nominees. The award is notable not for what it says about Hatch, but for what it says about the ecosystem: a coworking space in Colombo, in a country that had recently endured an economic crisis, was judged the best in the world by an international panel.
The AI Chapter
Gnanam’s most recent ventures extend the infrastructure logic into the digital layer. Veracity AI, founded in 2018, is a professional services and product development firm specialising in data science, machine learning, and computer vision — now part of Veracity Group, with approximately three hundred staff serving clients across Australia, Singapore, Norway, India, the United States, and the Middle East.
SpectrifyAI, co-founded in 2020, applies spectral scanning and machine learning to agricultural products — analysing the chemical composition of tea, spices, and soil in real time. The inspiration, characteristically, came from an unexpected direction: Gnanam’s interest in astronomy led him to wonder whether the spectral analysis used to determine the chemical composition of distant planets could be applied to tea leaves. It could.
These ventures are early-stage. Whether they reach the scale of Orion City or Hatch is an open question. But the pattern is consistent: identify infrastructure that the ecosystem lacks, build it, then move to the next layer.
The Through-Line
Gnanam is not a software engineer. He is not a product builder in the conventional sense. What he builds is the space — physical, institutional, digital — in which other people build products. Orion City gave established firms a campus. Hatch gave startups a home. The Lankan Angel Network, which he co-founded, gave investors a structure. SLASSCOM, which he chaired, gave the industry a voice. Veracity AI and SpectrifyAI are, in their own way, infrastructure too — capabilities that other companies will eventually build upon.
The founders profiled elsewhere in this series built companies. Gnanam built the rooms those companies work in. The distinction matters. In an ecosystem where the binding constraint has historically been infrastructure rather than talent, the person who removes that constraint enables everything that follows.
Sources:
Echelon, “How I Did It: Jeevan Gnanam”: https://echelon.lk/how-i-did-it-jeevan-gnanam/
Echelon, NE100 Profile — Jeevan Gnanam: https://ne100.echelon.lk/jeevan-gnanam
Orion City: https://www.orioncity.lk/
Hatch: https://hatch.lk/
Daily FT, “Hatch creates South Asian history with Best Co-Working Space in the World award”: https://www.ft.lk/front-page/Hatch-creates-South-Asian-history-with-Best-Co-Working-Space-in-the-World-award/44-726501
The Sunday Times, “Jeevan Gnanam takes over as SLASSCOM chairman”: https://www.sundaytimes.lk/180708/business-times/jeevan-gnanam-takes-over-as-slasscom-chairman-301277.html
The Morning, “Blending agriculture and tech for a new future: Jeevan Gnanam on SpectrifyAI”: https://www.themorning.lk/blending-agriculture-and-tech-for-a-new-future-jeevan-gnanam-on-his-newest-venture-spectrifyai/
Wikipedia, “A. Y. S. Gnanam”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Y._S._Gnanam
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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