FT.com / Companies / IT - Blink, and there's another million

FT.com / Companies / IT - Blink, and there's another million

Blink, and there's another million
By Emiliya (edited by) Mychasuk

Published: May 17 2007 03:00 | Last updated: May 17 2007 03:00

Joining the ranks of the newest young paper millionaires in the media sector is the 29-year-old running the video search portal called Blinkx, Sri-Lankan born Suranga Chandratillake.

The £114m listing of Blinkx on Aim will deliver him a paper worth of about £2.7m, based on his holding of 4.5m options.

Mr Chandratillake started at the age of eight when his father, a professor of nuclear chemistry, brought home a second-hand BBC computer to play with.

"The BBC computers at the time had no games on them, so the only way I got anything out of it was to write bits of code myself," Mr Chandratillake says.

He went on to study computer science at Cambridge and, while still at university, wrote risk- balancing algorithms for Morgan Stanley and founded a technology company, Anondesign, with friends.

At the age of 23 he joined Autonomy, the search software company, and by the time of his 25th birthday had become the US chief technology officer.

After three years at Autonomy, in 2004 he founded Blinkx. The company used Autonomy's search technology in exchange for giving Autonomy an option.

Mike Lynch, founder and chief executive of Autonomy, says Blinkx reminds him of the early days when he founded Autonomy in 1996, when he was only a few years younger than Mr Chandratillake. Mr Lynch went on to become theUK's first internet billionnaire.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2007