Ep 41 - Ishini Saparamadu - Founder & CEO of Concolabs

In this episode of the Founders & Funding Podcast, Philip Smith speaks with Ishini Saparamadu, Founder and CEO of Concolabs, a construction AI company she started as an undergraduate in Sri Lanka.

Ishini explains how a chatbot she built in her third year studying quantity surveying, and a screen recording she posted to LinkedIn and Facebook, brought in her first construction users and set the foundation for the business. She talks about funding the early stages through grants, bootstrapping on client subscriptions, running forward-deployed customisation work alongside the core product, and why raising capital from Sri Lanka is particularly difficult.

Ishini also shares why she believes founders should look to their own clients first for investment and introductions, the three skills she thinks matter most, and why resilience comes top of that list after delayed payments and team departures.