“If the entire world shared Asanka’s moral compass, intellect, and boundless enthusiasm, the world would have far fewer problems today.”
—Mike Goss
CFO, Conde Nast Publications
Former COO, Bain Capital
An honors graduate of the London School of Economics, Asanka Pathiraja 04C spent five years as a Wall Street corporate attorney at an Am Law 50 firm before transitioning to focus on investing in emerging technologies. Among other investments, he was an early seed funder of Builder.AI, winner of the AI Startup Award at the Europas 2020, and Virtualitics, which provides AI-enabled data analytics to Fortune 500 companies, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the Taittinger Gallery.
Pathiraja is active in several philanthropic causes, including Prince William’s wildlife conservation charity, Tusk, and his own charity, the Nishantha Fund—an education initiative founded in 2019 after the tragic death of Pathiraja’s cousin and aunt during the sectarian Easter bombings in Sri Lanka. In recognition of his contributions to Tusk, he was invited to attend a Jubilee dinner at Windsor Castle hosted by Prince William in 2015 and was later made a member of the Royal Enclosure at the Royal Ascot. In 2017, while running the world’s most exotic marathon in the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya to raise funds for Tusk, he became an honorary member of the Maasai tribe.
Pathiraja also works alongside his good friend and mentor Sir Richard Branson on a range of global issues, including working to end the death penalty in Sri Lanka, advising on strategy for Branson’s leadership forum The New Now, and participating in extreme global endurance challenges to raise funds for Big Change. With Branson and friends, Pathiraja cycled the mountain stage of the Tour de France and completed an Ironman Triathlon in Sicily, finishing atop an active Mt. Etna.
His advice to Emory students is to dream big and be relentless. “One thing I’ve seen is that irrespective of celebrity, fortune, or status, everyone goes through difficult times in pursuit of their dreams,” he says. “Persistence is everything.”