Purple Software started in 2020 with a simple belief: software should make work easier, not become another thing people have to manage.
I co-founded Purple Software with Shazeen Siraj, Prabodh De Silva, Huzam Ismail and Avishka Perera. In the beginning, it was less about building a large company and more about building useful software well. We were engineers and builders trying to solve real problems for businesses.
Over time, that became something much bigger.
From software projects to a software company
One of the most important things I learned while building Purple was that successful software is rarely just a technical problem.
The code matters, but so does understanding how a business actually operates.
- Where does work get delayed?
- Where do people repeatedly make mistakes?
- What information gets lost between departments?
- What are people doing manually simply because nobody has questioned the process yet?
That thinking gradually shaped how we approached software.
Rather than forcing businesses to adapt themselves to generic systems, we started designing software around the way each business actually works.
Today, that philosophy sits at the centre of Purple Software.
We build custom intelligent software and AI systems that remove repetitive work, reduce operational errors and allow people to focus on higher-value decisions. Purple has now delivered more than 70 projects, while the systems we have built collectively save clients more than 1,600 hours of work every month.
The business became part of the engineering problem
Building Purple also changed the way I think about companies.
As engineers, we naturally optimise software systems.
But companies are systems too.
They have inputs, outputs, bottlenecks, feedback loops, dependencies and failure points.
A large part of my work eventually moved beyond writing software and into designing the company itself: how we manage projects, how departments communicate, how performance is measured, how decisions are made and how technology can remove unnecessary work from our own operations.
In a strange way, Purple Software became one of the most complicated systems I have ever worked on.
And it is still being built.
Where Purple is going
The direction today is increasingly focused on intelligent software.
Traditional software waits for a human to operate it.
The next generation of software can understand information, make decisions within defined boundaries, perform work and involve a human only when necessary.
That shift has influenced much of what we are building at Purple now.
But the underlying objective has stayed the same since the beginning.
Technology should create freedom.
If software can remove hours of repetitive work, prevent unnecessary mistakes or give someone more time to spend doing something that actually matters to them, then the technology has done its job.
That idea eventually became the purpose behind Purple Software:
Build software that gives people the freedom to do what truly matters.