Charaka Goonatilake

Charaka Goonatilake is a Sri Lankan-born computer scientist and data technologist whose academic career culminated in a Doctor of Philosophy in Computational Chemistry from the University of Cambridge. His transition from computational science to cybersecurity analytics positioned him at the frontier of an emerging discipline: using large-scale data engineering to make enterprise security measurable, continuous, and operationally useful.

Before co-founding Panaseer, Goonatilake worked at BAE Systems Applied Intelligence (formerly Detica), where he developed a Hadoop-based security analytics platform for cyber threat detection — one of the earliest production deployments of big data technology in an enterprise security context. That work gave him direct visibility into the core problem that Panaseer would go on to solve: organisations had invested in sophisticated security tools but had no way to systematically verify whether those tools were deployed, correctly configured, and working as intended across their vast and constantly changing IT estates.

In 2014, Goonatilake co-founded Panaseer alongside Nik Whitfield, Sophie Harrison, and Mike MacIntyre, bringing his deep technical expertise as founding CTO. He led the development of Panaseer's proprietary data model and the security data lake architecture that underpins its Continuous Controls Monitoring platform — enabling the normalisation and correlation of data from dozens of disparate security and IT products into a single, trusted view of an organisation's security posture.

Under Goonatilake's technical leadership, Panaseer pioneered the Continuous Controls Monitoring product category, attracted $43 million in total funding from investors including Evolution Equity Partners, Notion Capital, and Cisco Investments, and scaled to over 100 employees with operations in London and New York. The company's customers include leading financial services, healthcare, and government organisations on both sides of the Atlantic.