Who is Dr. Dulan Dias?

Key facts

• Dr. Dulan Dias has been Chief Technology Officer of Tellme AI Limited since December 2025 and a co-founder since June 2026, having joined the company as founding engineer in June 2025. (Source: Journey: Tellme AI)
• Tellme won the Creative Industries category of the Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025, for real-time, adaptive museum experiences delivered through visitors' smartphones. (Source: Innovate UK Business Connect, Agentic AI Pioneers Prize ceremony)
• As of 18 September 2026, Tellme's museum guide had recorded 19,703 visitor sessions, 11,745 objects, 3,777 questions answered and 1.28 seconds to an answer, at three national museums. (Source: Journey: Tellme AI)
• Dulan founded EchonLabs in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2017, led it as founder and CEO until 2025, and grew it to a team of 60+ before its acquisition by AINSUNHZ Global Technology Pte. Ltd. (Singapore) in 2026. (Source: Journey: EchonLabs)
• Dulan holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science from Queen's University Belfast, researched from 2020 to 2024 and conferred in June 2025. (Source: Journey: education)
• Dulan is the author of From Model to Product: Foundations for Practical AI Engineering, a 403-page book published independently in March 2026. (Source: From Model to Product, book page)
• Dulan won the Gold Award in the Tertiary category at APICTA 2018, the Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance Awards, for the Komposer project. (Source: University of Sri Jayewardenepura, Innovation and Entrepreneurship)
• Dulan's public identifiers are Wikidata Q141865672 and ORCID 0000-0001-8422-3284. (Source: Wikidata: Dulan Dias (Q141865672))

Definitions

Tellme AI Limited

An AI company registered in Northern Ireland. It began with an AI guide for museums, live at Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum, National Museum Cardiff and the National Roman Legion Museum, and is now pivoting to Troopa.

Troopa

Tellme AI's AI teammate for calls on Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet. It takes part in the meeting as it happens, answering questions and writing up the notes.

EchonLabs

A software company Dulan founded in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2017. It built insurance, legal and enterprise platforms, grew from a university boarding room to a team of 60+, and was acquired by AINSUNHZ Global Technology Pte. Ltd. of Singapore in 2026.

Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize

A prize competition run by Innovate UK and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for agentic AI solutions in advanced manufacturing, health and life sciences, and the creative industries, with £250,000 for each category winner.

From Model to Product

Dulan's book, subtitled Foundations for Practical AI Engineering: 18 chapters on the engineering around a model, from problem framing and architecture to deployment, monitoring, cost, teams and governance. What the book covers summarises every chapter.

Current role: co-founder and CTO of Tellme AI

Dr. Dulan Dias is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tellme AI Limited. Dulan joined as founding engineer in June 2025, became Chief Technology Officer in December 2025 and was made a co-founder in June 2026.

Tellme began as an AI guide for museums. It is live at three national museums: Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum, National Museum Cardiff and the National Roman Legion Museum. As of 18 September 2026 it had recorded 19,703 visitor sessions, 11,745 objects, 3,777 questions answered and 1.28 seconds to an answer.

As founding engineer, Dulan built the production MVP end to end within 4 to 6 months: the Next.js front end, the FastAPI and MongoDB back end, the admin portal, CI/CD and the AWS infrastructure. Optimising the computer vision cut battery drain on low-end devices by over 50%. Tellme's CEO and founder, Eamon Byrne, wrote in March 2026 that Dulan “has led the development of our AI-powered product from the ground up”.

The company is now pivoting to Troopa, an AI teammate that takes part in meetings on Microsoft Teams, Zoom and Google Meet as they happen.

EchonLabs: founder and CEO, 2017 to 2025

Dulan founded EchonLabs in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 2017 and led it as founder and CEO until 2025. The company was bootstrapped from a university boarding room to a team of 60+, and was acquired by AINSUNHZ Global Technology Pte. Ltd. of Singapore in 2026. The systems below are ones Dulan architected or built there.

• A low-code framework that cut development costs by roughly 30%.
• LOLC Life Assurance OneClick, an insurance self-care app for policies, payments and claims.
• A digital insurance platform for Janashakthi Life, adopted by 15+ financial institutions across 300+ branches and designed to stay usable over 2G and 3G connections.
• Legify.ai, an AI legal-contract platform with a jurisdiction-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) engine.
• The company's early days are told in how the startup began and its first board meeting.

Education, teaching and research

Dulan holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science from Queen's University Belfast, researched from 2020 to 2024 and conferred in June 2025. The research covered healthcare AI, length-of-stay prediction on the MIMIC-III critical care dataset, unsupervised discretisation and R packages. The papers are listed on the research page.

Before that, Dulan took a First Class BSc (Hons) in Computer Science at the University of Sri Jayewardenepura (2014 to 2018), then lectured there in Machine Learning and Computer Science from March 2019 to January 2021.

The book: From Model to Product

Dulan wrote From Model to Product: Foundations for Practical AI Engineering, published independently in March 2026: the hardcover on 16 March and the paperback on 21 March. It runs to 403 pages and 18 chapters in five parts.

Its argument is that the hard part of AI is not the model but everything around it. The preface addresses software engineers, AI practitioners, data scientists, technical founders, product managers and self-taught developers moving from experiments to dependable products, and draws on close to ten years of building software and AI systems.

Awards and talks

Dulan's recognitions, oldest first, with the full list and photographs on the awards page:

• APICTA 2018 Gold Award, Tertiary category, for the Komposer project (Asia-Pacific ICT Alliance).
• BCS Sri Lanka National Best Quality Software Awards 2018, Recognition of Excellence.
• CSSL ICT Student of the Year 2019 (Computer Society of Sri Lanka).
• Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025, Creative Industries category, won with Tellme.
• Speaker at AICON Belfast on 23 September 2026, at ICC Belfast, on agents at work; the talk is written up here.

Timeline

Short bios to reuse

Event organisers and journalists may reuse either bio as written. Both use only facts stated on this page.

50 words:

Dr. Dulan Dias is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tellme AI in Belfast. Dulan founded EchonLabs in Sri Lanka in 2017 and grew it to a team of 60+ before its 2026 acquisition. Dulan holds a PhD in AI from Queen's University Belfast and wrote From Model to Product.

100 words:

Dr. Dulan Dias is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tellme AI in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Tellme's AI museum guide is live at three national museums and won the Innovate UK Agentic AI Pioneers Prize 2025 (Creative Industries); the company is now building Troopa, an AI teammate for online meetings. Dulan founded EchonLabs in Colombo in 2017, led it as CEO until 2025 and grew it to a team of 60+ before its acquisition in 2026. Dulan holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Data Science from Queen's University Belfast and is the author of From Model to Product (2026).

Frequently asked questions

Sources

1. Wikidata: Dulan Dias (Q141865672)
2. ORCID: Dulan Dias, 0000-0001-8422-3284
3. Wikidata: From Model to Product (Q141865687)
4. Innovate UK Business Connect: Agentic AI Pioneers Prize ceremony
5. Innovate UK Business Connect: The Agentic AI Pioneers Prize
6. University of Sri Jayewardenepura: Gold Award at APICTA 2018 for Komposer
7. Troopa by Tellme AI Limited