Purple Software started with four engineers and a lot of ambition.
I co-founded the company with Shazeen Siraj, Prabodh De Silva, Huzam Ismail and Avishka Perera. There was no large team behind us in those early days. We were the engineers, project managers, support team and problem solvers. We spoke to clients, understood their businesses, designed the solutions, wrote the software, deployed it and dealt with whatever broke afterwards.
That experience shaped Purple more than anything else could have. We weren’t looking at business problems through presentations or reports; we were sitting directly with the people experiencing them. We saw businesses struggling with repetitive work, disconnected systems, human errors and processes that had simply been accepted as “the way things are done.” Then we built software to fix them.
Over time, we became very good at solving those kinds of problems.
Building Purple around freedom
Purple was never meant to be just another software company. From the beginning, we wanted the company to stand for something, and that eventually became one word: freedom.
The idea is simple. Purple should create freedom for everyone connected to it: our clients, our team and our shareholders. For clients, that means software that removes work, errors and unnecessary operational complexity. For our team, it means creating an environment where talented people have control over how they work. For shareholders, it means building a company capable of growing without becoming dependent on constant intervention from a handful of people.
Building a company around that idea was harder than saying it.
Giving people freedom sounds great until you have to trust them with it. Traditional companies solve that problem with fixed hours, supervision, approvals and rules. We wanted to see whether we could build the opposite: a company where people are trusted to take ownership and are judged primarily by the results they produce.
Today, our team can work from wherever they want and structure their working hours around their lives. We don’t care much about whether someone is sitting at a desk at 9:00 AM. We care whether they own their responsibilities, communicate properly and produce the outcome expected from them.
At the time of writing this, Purple has grown to 21 people. The interesting part for me is that maintaining this culture has increasingly affected how we hire. Freedom doesn’t work for everyone. We look for people who become more capable when given autonomy, not people who need someone constantly telling them what to do next.
From four engineers to a system
As Purple grew, we discovered another problem. Freedom without structure quickly becomes chaos.
If every person has to decide from scratch how something should be done, the company becomes dependent on individual judgment for hundreds of repetitive decisions. That doesn’t create freedom; it creates cognitive load.
So we started systemising the company.
Today, Purple operates with standard operating procedures for almost every important recurring process. Projects, finance, HR, sales, client communication, software development, testing, deployments and many other parts of the business have defined ways of operating.
The objective isn’t bureaucracy. It is the opposite.
A good system removes unnecessary decisions. People shouldn’t have to ask three managers what to do every time the same situation happens. The system should already give them enough clarity to act independently.
This combination has become an important part of how I think about organisations: give people as much freedom as possible, then build enough structure around them that the freedom can actually work.
Purple today operates far more like a well-oiled machine than the five engineers who started by doing everything ourselves. There is still plenty to improve, but the company is becoming increasingly capable of operating through systems rather than depending entirely on individual people.
Software that reached beyond businesses
Purple had the opportunity to contribute to the digitalisation of Sri Lanka’s legal sector through projects involving the Legal Aid Commission, Colombo Law Society, Sri Lanka Judges’ Institute and the Commercial High Court of Colombo, including work undertaken in association with USAID.
We worked on systems intended to improve how important legal institutions operate and serve people. The Legal Aid Commission, for example, used a system developed by Purple to address financial management problems, including duplicate payments to lawyers. The Commercial High Court received a case-management system, while the Sri Lanka Judges’ Institute received its own digital members platform. Purple’s portfolio today includes several systems across judicial administration, financial management and institutional operations.
For me, these projects demonstrated something important about software. Good technology doesn’t only make companies more profitable. Applied in the right places, it can improve how institutions themselves function.
The businesses we’ve been fortunate enough to work with
Purple has now delivered 70+ projects for more than 50 businesses globally, and we estimate that the systems we’ve built collectively save our clients more than 1,600 hours of work every month.
Along the way, we’ve had the opportunity to work with organisations including Red Bull, LOLC, USAID, DIMO, Stassen, Chemonics International, LankaPay, iPay, Daraz, IWMI, Foursquare Church alongside many startups, SMEs and organisations outside Sri Lanka.
The industries have been equally varied. We’ve built systems for financial services, healthcare, legal institutions, travel, property services, retail, mental health, religious organisations and many other areas. That diversity has been valuable because the underlying problem is surprisingly similar across most businesses: people are still spending huge amounts of time compensating for inefficient systems.
The technology changes. The problem usually doesn’t.
Where Purple is heading now
Purple started as a custom software company, but our definition of software is changing.
Traditional software gives people tools. A human still has to open the system, understand what needs to happen and perform the work. Artificial intelligence creates the possibility of something fundamentally different: software that can understand information, follow rules, make decisions within boundaries and perform parts of the work itself.
That is where much of our attention is going now.
We are increasingly focused on Custom Intelligent Software and AI Digital Staff: systems built around the actual way a business operates, with intelligence embedded wherever it can remove repetitive work, reduce errors or eliminate unnecessary human involvement. Instead of forcing a company to change its operations to accommodate generic software, we want the software to adapt around the company.
AI has also fundamentally changed how software itself can be built. Development that once required large teams and long timelines can increasingly be accomplished with smaller, highly capable teams using AI throughout the engineering process.
I think that change will have a significant effect on Purple over the next several years.
What we’re actually trying to build
After all the changes in technology, team size and direction, the reason Purple exists has become clearer rather than more complicated.
Our mission is:
Build software that gives people the freedom to do what truly matters.
That applies to the employee who shouldn’t spend half their day copying information between spreadsheets. It applies to the CEO who shouldn’t have to personally hold an entire operation together. It applies to our own team members who shouldn’t have to organize their lives around arbitrary working hours if they can produce excellent work another way.
Technology is ultimately a tool for buying back human time.
That is what I want Purple to become exceptionally good at.
We started as five engineers building software ourselves. Today, there are 21 of us building systems for businesses around the world. The technologies will continue changing, and Purple will undoubtedly look very different again several years from now.
But I hope the foundation never changes.
Freedom for our clients. Freedom for our people. And software that gives everyone more time for what actually matters.