| Suran Goonatilake | |
| Birth Place: | Colombo, Sri Lanka |
| Alma Mater: | Royal College Colombo University of Sussex University College London |
Suran Goonatilake, OBE is an academic, entrepreneur and producer. He is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).[1]
He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex in Computing and Artificial Intelligence, followed by a PhD at University College London (UCL) in Machine Learning.
As a student at UCL, Goonatilake, co-founded with three fellow students, a Machine Learning company called Searchspace.[2] In May 2005 Searchspace was acquired by Warburg Pincus.
He is the co-founder of several Deep Tech companies, many of which are the result of commercialising research from British Universities [3]
In 2005, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's birthday honours list, for his services to Entrepreneurship.[4]
He founded the Centre for Fashion Enterprise[5] in London a non-profit initiative that finances and nurtures high-growth fashion designers in London. This initiative pioneered a new model of building luxury fashion companies and drew upon practises from technology start-ups, film and music industries.[6] Famous alumni include Erdem Moralıoğlu, Marios Schwab,[7] Mary Katrantzou, Manish Arora, and JW Anderson.
In 2006, Goonatilake was an executive producer on the romantic comedy, Scenes of a Sexual Nature, directed by Ed Blum and starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Hardy. The film was distributed independently via The Really Honest Little Distribution Company [8] and premiered as the closing film to the 2006 London Raindance Film Festival.[9]
In 2007 he was the executive producer for Luxury Unveiled,[10] [11] a documentary TV series on the world's top fashion and luxury brands including Chanel, Tiffany, Dunhill and Cartier.
Goonatilake is a co-editor of two books,