After five years in North America, Deepsea Coders is expanding into Sri Lanka with a product portfolio spanning business processes, HR and workforce management, mobile applications, and data and AI. It brings with it the security, compliance, and data-driven standards developed overseas, adapted to local business practices.
Having spent two years studying the local market, the company is now building solutions around the specific workflows of Sri Lankan organisations. Echelon spoke to Rasika Samaratunga, Chief Executive Officer at Deepsea Coders, about its product strategy, local market experience, and plans for the future.
Deepsea Coders’ identity was developed over five years in the Canadian and North American market before entering Sri Lanka. How has the experience shaped your approach?
The North American market operates on a different set of expectations altogether, particularly around data security and compliance. Clients expect strict regulatory standards from day one. In Alberta, for instance, data privacy is a defining concern, so every product is built around compliance frameworks from the ground up, extending to details as specific as work experience, which may be treated as protected personal data under legislation such as POPA. Staying competitive also means adopting emerging technologies such as AI and data analytics, but doing so responsibly. For example, using AI to score candidates during recruitment is considered unethical and unlawful in Canada, where decision-making processes must remain transparent and justifiable. As we bring our products into Sri Lanka, we adapt them to local needs while maintaining the same standard of rigour.
Your portfolio spans a broad range of services, from document management and e-signature to HR, payroll, and more. What’s your process for deciding what to build next?
Everything we build starts with requirements identified through direct work with users who have encountered genuine problems with the tools they were using. Having worked with ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) systems and legacy platforms across North America, we have seen firsthand where they fall short, and we build on insights gathered directly from customers rather than guessing. In practice, this plays out as a mix of systems tailored to a specific client’s requirements and broader products built around an industry-wide need. Eformasign is an example of the latter: it has all the features of a standard signature platform, but with advanced e-forms and document management workflows shaped by fixing recurring failures we saw in the industry.
How are your products performing in the Sri Lankan market so far?
Performance has been strong across the board, though Eformasign has probably had the strongest reception. Alongside it, LinkEduPro, our learning management system, serves both educational institutes and individual educators, allowing users to build and manage their own websites within the platform. Our Professional Learning Management System takes a similar approach but for organisations, handling structured training and evaluation for management-level staff. Staff Recovery, our Employee Recovery and Absence Tracking System, has seen more gradual adoption here simply because there is no local competitor to compare it against. In Canada, it has been used to analyse incident patterns within organisations, identifying high-risk locations so maintenance teams could act pre-emptively. Rounding out the portfolio is our HRIS (Human Resources Information System), originally built for the Canadian Market and adapted for Sri Lanka after two years of local market analysis.
The market already has several document management and HRIS products. How does Deepsea Coders differentiate itself from local and international competitors?
The core distinction is that we are not a vendor; we are a software development company that builds our own products in-house, covering design, architecture, development, testing, customer engagement, and analytics. We will never ask an organisation to change how it operates to fit our system; we study their existing processes first, then tailor the system around them. Most SaaS platforms are built around standardised processes, requiring organisations to adapt to the platform rather than the other way around, which is one of the key reasons many HRIS solutions struggle to meet the specific needs of organisations in Sri Lanka. Take shift patterns, for example. North American shifts are largely fixed, while Sri Lankan factories often run longer shifts with overtime. Our systems adapt to that reality rather than forcing businesses to change how they operate. We have also carried over the same standards and work ethic, including how we treat our own staff, without compromise.
You have had a presence in Sri Lanka for two years before this official launch. What did this introductory period teach you about the similarities between local organisations and your North American clients?
Over those two years, we established a software development branch here while analysing the Sri Lankan market. Having started as an outsourcing partner to North American companies, we noticed that the same gaps we were addressing there also existed here. Market analysis and user research, including visits to organisations, confirmed our observations. Recognising those shared needs is what lets us take a selection of existing products and adapt them to the Sri Lankan market rather than starting from zero.
We have also built products for the local market from scratch, including a Board and Governance Management System for managing board documentation and workflows, developed in response to a request from a Sri Lankan client
How will the foundation you have built so far set up the next decade of Deepsea Coders?
Right now, our main focus is on building healthy, lasting relationships with our partners and customers, and that will remain a priority over the next ten years, rather than treating engagements as one-offs. Alongside that, we’ll keep working to understand the issues organisations face and solve them through practical solutions. Being active in North America means we are often among the first to encounter new technologies, and we want to bring those into Sri Lanka. Technology tends to move in a particular direction, from North America through Europe before reaching Asia, and given our position, we see ourselves as a bridge, able to introduce these advances here earlier than they might otherwise arrive.