Principals: The Serial Builder
How Imal Kalutotage Went from Factory Floors to Venture Capital
A Sri Lankan engineer left a corporate career at HPE, built an IoT platform that was acquired for $15.5 million, pivoted into fintech, and is now deploying capital back into the ecosystem that shaped him.
Saint Clair Asia · Ground Truth | April 2026
Every ecosystem needs its first big exit. Not because the money matters — though it does — but because exits create proof. They demonstrate to founders that building is not futile, to investors that capital can be returned, and to the next generation that the path exists. In Sri Lanka’s technology sector, that proof arrived in December 2019, on a factory floor.
The Corporate Ladder and the Jump
Imal Kalutotage grew up in Gampaha, the son of government servants. He lost his father at fourteen. His mother, by his own account, instilled the values that would define his career: courage, perseverance, and an intolerance for mediocrity.
He studied electronics and telecommunications engineering at the University of Moratuwa — Sri Lanka’s most competitive engineering programme — followed by an MBA from the University of Colombo. What followed was a conventional ascent through multinational technology companies: IBM, Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Regional roles, multimillion-dollar deals, the trajectory of a person who understood how large organisations buy and sell technology.
Then he left. The severance package from HPE became his seed capital. The corporate strategist became a founder.
The Factory Floor
Around 2014, Kalutotage and his school friend Vijitha Abeywardena founded nCinga Innovations — a Singapore-incorporated, Colombo-built IoT platform for apparel manufacturing. The thesis was specific: garment factories were running on manual processes and delayed reports, leaving ninety per cent of their operational data uncaptured. nCinga’s platform, nFactory 4.0, automated the shop floor — real-time production monitoring, quality tracking, predictive analytics — and delivered it as a SaaS product.
The market was not obvious. Apparel manufacturing is not the sector that venture capitalists associate with cutting-edge technology. But it is Sri Lanka’s largest export industry, and the inefficiencies were enormous. Kalutotage had identified a gap that sat at the intersection of what Sri Lanka knew how to build and what the global garment industry needed.
nCinga expanded rapidly — Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, Indonesia. Within five years, the platform was deployed in over fifty factories across multiple countries. The company attracted backing from Dunamis Capital and the Dialog Axiata Digital Innovation Fund, managed by BOV Capital, along with angel investors including the late Dinesh Schaffter.
The Exit
In December 2019, Zilingo — a Singapore-based fashion technology platform — acquired nCinga for $15.5 million in a cash-and-stock transaction. TechCrunch covered the deal. The Sri Lankan technology press described it as the country’s largest tech product startup exit.
The significance was not the figure. It was the signal. A Sri Lankan SaaS company, built in Colombo, had been acquired by a regional platform for its technology — not its labour, not its cost advantage, but its intellectual property. The acquisition demonstrated that Sri Lankan startups could build proprietary products valued on their own terms.
What Zilingo intended to do with the technology — deploying nCinga’s manufacturing execution system across its network of six thousand factories — was, in the end, less consequential than what the exit did for the ecosystem. It proved the model worked.
The Pivot
Kalutotage did not retire on the proceeds. The nCinga team regrouped under a new entity, NCINGA, and built IFINITY — a fintech company focused on transforming legacy banking systems into cloud-native, open-banking-compliant platforms. The pivot from factory floors to banking infrastructure was less abrupt than it appears: both problems involved taking antiquated systems drowning in unstructured data and making them intelligent.
IFINITY partnered with Temenos, engaged with over sixty senior bankers across more than twenty Sri Lankan financial institutions, and expanded into Indonesia and the United Kingdom within three years. The Digital Innovation Fund — the same BOV Capital vehicle that had backed nCinga — invested again and subsequently exited successfully, completing a full venture capital cycle: seed, scale, exit, reinvest.
The Fund
The most recent chapter is, arguably, the most significant. Kalutotage established nVentures — a Singapore-based, MAS-licensed venture capital fund focused on early-stage fintech and B2B startups across South and Southeast Asia. It is, by some accounts, Sri Lanka’s first foreign venture capital firm licensed by Singapore’s Monetary Authority.
The fund has backed over a dozen startups to date, deploying over $1.5 million into companies including MintPay — Sri Lanka’s first buy-now-pay-later service — alongside ventures in accounting software, cooperative technology, and Web3 infrastructure. Three portfolio companies have reached breakeven with doubled year-over-year revenue. The fund’s first exit arrived in 2024: Kaiju Labs, a Web3 wallet-as-a-service startup, acquired by Singapore-based KAST Finance at a 2x multiple and a 48.6 per cent internal rate of return.
The numbers are modest by global standards. They are not modest for Sri Lanka, where annual venture capital investment remains in the low single-digit millions. More to the point, they represent something the ecosystem has lacked: a founder who experienced the full cycle — build, exit, learn — and is now recycling that experience and capital back into the next generation of companies.
The Arc
Kalutotage’s trajectory — corporate career, founder, exit, investor — is the arc that mature ecosystems produce as a matter of course. In Silicon Valley, it is unremarkable. In Colombo, it is still rare enough to be instructive.
The ecosystem builders profiled elsewhere in this series created the infrastructure: angel networks, venture funds, startup competitions. Kalutotage is evidence that the infrastructure works. He raised capital from Sri Lanka’s first venture fund. He exited to a regional acquirer. He built a second company with the same team. He is now investing in the cohort that follows.
The capital recycling loop — where successful founders become the next generation’s investors — is the mechanism that separates ecosystems that stall from ecosystems that compound. Sri Lanka has very few examples of this loop operating at full cycle. Kalutotage is one of them.
Sources:
TechCrunch, “Fashion platform Zilingo acquires Sri Lankan SaaS startup nCinga for $15.5M”: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/16/fashion-platform-zilingo-acquires-sri-lankan-saas-startup-ncinga-for-15-5m/
EconomyNext, “Singapore’s Zilingo acquires Sri Lanka’s nCinga for US$15.5mn”: https://economynext.com/singapores-zilingo-acquires-sri-lankas-ncinga-for-us15-5mn-36197/
Daily FT, “Digital Innovation Fund successfully exits IFINITY”: https://www.ft.lk/it-telecom-tech/Digital-Innovation-Fund-managed-by-BOV-Capital-powered-by-Dialog-Axiata-successfully-exits-IFINITY/50-781244
Daily FT, “nVentures celebrates first exit as Kast Finance acquires Kaiju Labs”: https://www.ft.lk/business/nVentures-celebrates-first-exit-as-Singapore-based-Kast-Finance-acquires-Sri-Lanka-s-Kaiju-Labs/34-769548/
The Island, “nVentures emerges as Sri Lanka’s first MAS-licensed foreign VC”: https://island.lk/nventures-emerges-as-sri-lankas-first-mas-licensed-foreign-vc-investing-over-us1-5-million-in-sri-lankan-startups/
nVentures, “The Largest Tech Product Startup Exit In Sri Lanka”: https://nventures.sg/the-largest-tech-product-startup-exit-in-sri-lanka/
Echelon, “Fashion industry’s data driven future”: https://echelon.lk/fashion-data-the-industrys-driven-future/
Sources:
TechCrunch, “Fashion platform Zilingo acquires Sri Lankan SaaS startup nCinga for $15.5M”: https://techcrunch.com/2019/12/16/fashion-platform-zilingo-acquires-sri-lankan-saas-startup-ncinga-for-15-5m/
EconomyNext, “Singapore’s Zilingo acquires Sri Lanka’s nCinga for US$15.5mn”: https://economynext.com/singapores-zilingo-acquires-sri-lankas-ncinga-for-us15-5mn-36197/
Daily FT, “Digital Innovation Fund successfully exits IFINITY”: https://www.ft.lk/it-telecom-tech/Digital-Innovation-Fund-managed-by-BOV-Capital-powered-by-Dialog-Axiata-successfully-exits-IFINITY/50-781244
Daily FT, “nVentures celebrates first exit as Kast Finance acquires Kaiju Labs”: https://www.ft.lk/business/nVentures-celebrates-first-exit-as-Singapore-based-Kast-Finance-acquires-Sri-Lanka-s-Kaiju-Labs/34-769548/
The Island, “nVentures emerges as Sri Lanka’s first MAS-licensed foreign VC”: https://island.lk/nventures-emerges-as-sri-lankas-first-mas-licensed-foreign-vc-investing-over-us1-5-million-in-sri-lankan-startups/
nVentures, “The Largest Tech Product Startup Exit In Sri Lanka”: https://nventures.sg/the-largest-tech-product-startup-exit-in-sri-lanka/
Echelon, “Fashion industry’s data driven future”: https://echelon.lk/fashion-data-the-industrys-driven-future/
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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