How Colombo-born SaaS firm WSO2 is building world-class software outside the Silicon Valley

Miles away from the glare of Silicon Valley’s gleaming skyscrapers and Bay Area’s romanticised unicorns—but closer to the startup hub of Bengaluru and the SaaS epicentre of Chennai—a quiet but resolute tech revolution is unfolding in the city of Colombo. 

The palm-tree lined streets of Sri Lanka’s capital may seem like an unlikely setup, but that’s just a deceptive facade.

A  robust tech ecosystem is developing in Colombo—thriving and competing with the global best. And the seeds of this were sown not now, but 20 years ago, when WSO2 set up shop in the city. 

The tech firm’s boldest bet was building enterprise middleware stack, which has now become the backbone for some of the world's largest corporations. WSO2's API management tools and software solutions have found their way into the digital infrastructure of Jio Platforms, Wipro, and Samsung, all after it chose to plant its roots in the island nation.

But to get here, the SaaS (software-as-a-service) firm has had to defy every conventional notion about where world-class software gets built. Behind its journey is visionary Sanjiva Weerawarana, a computer scientist whose 25-year stint in the open-source community led to the founding of the company.

Speaking at WSO2Con 2025, the company’s annual conference in Colombo, the CEO shared lessons from two decades of building a software company, along with building a tech ecosystem in Sri Lanka. 

Weerawarana weighed in on the idea of ‘longevity’ by referring to Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the world's oldest retail bank, tracing back to its first roots in 1472. 

“Longevity is relative. What it does say is about the ability of an organisation to live on for a long time, create value, and be interesting, along with creating employment, interesting experiences, and opportunities,” said Weerawarana.

“In the tech industry, 20 years is a long time. We crossed $100 million in revenue last year—only about one in 10,000 companies get to that size. For some reason, tech companies don’t tend to last that long, so hitting the 20-year (mark) becomes important.”

Open source innovation

The journey began in 2005 when Weerawarana joined forces with co-founders Davanum Srinivas and Paul Fremantle. 

The timing, as it turns out, was prescient. As the tech industry moved towards cloud computing and microservices, WSO2’s middleware stack— invisible but critical tools that act as a bridge, helping different software systems talk to each other—became increasingly valuable. 

The firm’s API management platform became the nervous system helping enterprises transition from cumbersome legacy systems to modern architectures.

“Marc Andressen’s article in 2011 talks about how software is eating the world. Today, everything is software powered… It has eaten the world. For countries like India, Sri Lanka, China or Japan… you shouldn’t be depending on somebody else for your software anymore. 

“It’s like energy independence or food security. The world is deglobalising in software. Everybody needs to have software security, and that only comes from open source and SaaS under your control,” Weerawarana told YourStory. 

Prior to WSO2, Weerawarana had worked in IBM’s research and development team in the United States, where he contributed to creating key web standards for how software systems talk to each other.

Today, WSO2 is a global software vendor that helps businesses in over 90 countries manage how their systems connect and share data, using open-source tools for APIs, integration, and secure access.

APIs, or application programming interfaces, are sets of rules that allow different software systems to communicate with each other.

While Silicon Valley startups chased venture funding and held on to proprietary advantage, WSO2 bet on open-sourcing its entire middleware stack, allowing over 75,000 developers worldwide to inspect and improve its code. Today, WSO2 competes directly with Google’s Apigee (a platform for developing and managing APIs) and US-based identity management giant Okta.

Now, as artificial intelligence rewrites enterprise software, WSO2 finds itself well positioned to ride this wave. Its latest API manager integrates AI-driven chatbots that let non-technical users test APIs using natural language. The firm’s Ballerina programming language, built specifically for integrating distributed systems, has become what Weerawarana calls “AI-native”.

“Behind every trend, there's usually some deep science,” he said. “It's easy to get swept up where everything seems like the next big thing. But you have to look beyond and see what is the 'aha' moment that’s driving it all. This is why first-principles thinking matters.”

WSO2’s other offerings include the Choreo internal developer platform as a service (IDPaaS), WSO2 Integration Manager and Devant integration platform as a service (iPaaS), and WSO2 API Manager and Bijira API management SaaS. 

Global presence 

What started as an ambitious experiment has now grown into a bridge between the country’s talent and global enterprise needs. 

The company employs over 800 people across offices in Australia, Brazil, Germany, India, the UAE, the UK, and the US, but Colombo remains the heart of operations. According to the founder, the firm has churned out at least 100 employees who have gone on to pursue PhDs in the field of computer science. 

WSO2’s platform currently serves a portfolio of clients across critical sectors, including government agencies, financial institutions, healthcare organisations, and multinational enterprises.

At the conference, Mifan Careem, Senior Vice President and Chief Solutions Officer, presented an overview of WSO2’s global operations, detailing how the platform supports some of the world’s most demanding digital infrastructures. These include a bank in Europe processing over 10,000 APIs and a global hotel chain enabling 50,000 mobile room accesses per second.

To date, the company claims to have processed over 60 trillion transactions, supporting more than 5,200 enterprise deployments across countries.

Supporting the needs of Indian clients

In India, Reserve Bank Innovation Hub (RBIH)—a wholly owned subsidiary of the Reserve Bank of India, recently announced the ‘Unified Lending Interface’ (ULI) to modernise digital lending for lenders and data providers. By using WSO2’s API Manager and WSO2 Identity Server, RBIH has been able to streamline financial data access, eliminating manual verification delays and boosting loan approvals.

Similarly, Wipro’s Digital Integration as a Service platform’s API marketplace is built on top of WSO2’s offerings. 

“AI without the right process of orchestration is a very expensive experiment. We can think of all different aspects of solution design, but if we do not design the process that we are enabling, technology becomes an overhead,” said Kenny Kesar, Global Chief Information Officer, Wipro. 

“WSO2 is our SOS (system of services). If it is down, we are blind across the organisation. We at Wipro run our entire API payloads and integrations through their platform. This is something we standardised about four years ago when we went live with our biggest transformation to date… It helped us drive our vision of one single UI for AI,” he added.  

At present, Reliance Jio Platforms is also deployed on WSO2 and handles millions of transactions daily through the platform. 

“Most of our internal business applications, including our HRMS (human resource management system), run on WSO2. One key use case is our work as a licensed GST Suvidha Provider for India, where we manage tax filing on behalf of taxpayers. The entire tax platform is integrated with WSO2, which handles the high-volume workloads of GST-related activities—such as processing invoices and transactions,” said Ashish Jha, Senior Vice President of Technology, Jio Platforms. 

WSO2’s journey is proof that software can be built in places where the world, particularly the West, hasn’t been looking.

(The writer was in Colombo recently on the invitation of WSO2, attending the company’s three-day conference, which featured hands-on sessions, developer labs, and architecture best practices.)