Balendran Thavarajah arrived in Australia in 2000 penniless and unable to speak English. Twenty-three years on, he is a successful tech entrepreneur who has founded a string of multi-million-dollar companies employing hundreds of people.
‘Bala’ grew up on Sri Lanka’s Jaffna Peninsula amid the chaos of the civil war that lasted a decade and a half. Caught in crossfire during the brutal conflict between Tamil separatists and the Sir Lankan army, he was wounded several times.
His lost his mother when he was just two years old, and the war robbed him of any meaningful education and the chance of a bright future.
But arriving in Australia afforded him an opportunity to rebuild his life.
Now, his own experiences struggling to learn a new language have brought Bala full circle with his latest tech enterprise; a world leading artificial intelligence app that helps people learn English.
Like many refugees, Bala’s early life was a world away from his current circumstances.
“Mum and Dad married when they were 17 and 20 respectively in an arranged marriage. But Mum struggled with things. My Dad invested in a trucking venture which went belly up and Mum took her own life when I was two,” Bala said.
“Dad worked so I grew up with my aunts and uncles. My mother’s and father’s sisters both supported me. They were fantastic; they looked after me along with their own kids.”
Bala says that at 13 living in a small coastal village, he had no opportunity to go to school and soon became caught up in the civil war.
“As a young teenager I was just hanging around the village with nothing to do,” he said.
“And then the war came. As Tamils we were targeted by the government, and I was caught in crossfire four or five times. I was injured by shrapnel and gunshots.”
Like many young Tamils at the time Bala fled to India seeking safety and some kind of future.
“I ended up going to India by boat. We were 24 illegal migrants on a dangerous journey. The Indian navy caught us and we were put in a refugee camp in Tamil Naidu, in the south of India,” Bala said.
“I spent ten months in India. We were safe from the conflict and people weren’t dying but the camp was overcrowded with thousands crammed into unsanitary conditions,” he said.
Bala arrived in Sydney in 2000 following his father who had migrated earlier.
“There was a bit of a process to convince immigration that I was the legitimate son of my father because I had no documents,” he said.
“I also had to provide proof I had been shot and that I would be in danger if I returned to Sri Lanka – but that got me to Sydney to join my father.
“Life in Australia started for me at 25 but I quickly realised that I had nothing to give this country. So, I saw it as a mission and a challenge to build a new life in a new country amid a new culture.
“It was this realisation that made me work really hard. I know I needed to learn the language of my new country or I would not have opportunities,” he said.
Bala connected with migrant and refugee settlement agency AMES Australia in western Sydney where he learned English at night classes.
“I spent 12 months intensively building my English and communication skills,” he said.
“I thought I would go to university because at the time Google and the big tech companies were becoming big. I was interested in technology because of the way it was growing and the massive opportunities on the internet.
“But I was naive. I went to all the universities asking for a place and saying I would do everything they asked. But they all told me ‘you won’t be able to understand the lectures’,” Bala said.
At the time, Western Sydney University (WSU) was pioneering an ‘alternative pathways’ program aimed at migrants, refugees and disadvantaged students. It allowed students to attempt two units and, if they could cope, go on to complete the entire degree.
“This opened a door for me and gave me a chance,” Bala said.
He completed a three-year computer science degree at WSU and went on to gain a master’s degree in computer science from Sydney University.
“When I completed my degree at WSU, I went to see the lady who had given me the OK to join the alternative pathway program. I thanked her and we cried. It was an emotional time,” Bala said.
“I worked 16 to 17 hours a day over that time. I was attending lectures during the day and doing extra English and Mathematics classes at TAFE in the evenings.
“And luckily for me, I had people around me willing to help out. They heard my story and helped me to understand the coursework.
“Soon after arriving in Australia, I realised there were opportunities in the internet, tech and online economy for those who got in early. This was interesting to me because growing up in my village, there was no electricity, let alone technology,” he said.
But Bala’s journey was not always smooth.
“Sometimes I got close to giving up because I just had too much on my plate. And some of my dad’s friends said ‘just get a certificate and become a security guard’,” he said.
“But I said ‘no’, I want bigger things. I knew I had the aptitude and drive to succeed and rebuild my life,” Bala said.
After finishing his university degrees, Bala set out on his entrepreneurial adventure, starting his first enterprise.
“I had the skills to build software, so I thought I would start my own company,” Bala said.
“We looked at small and medium supermarkets and point of sale software. Companies like Woolies were paying IBM hundreds of thousands of dollars for this software. But we were able to build software for smaller businesses.
“We sold the software to twenty supermarkets in eight months across western Sydney for just $6,000 each,” he said.
But without the business experience or the resources to scale up the business, Bala eventually sold the company to another software enterprise.
After spending two years working as a software engineer with Centrelink, in Canberra, Bala returned to the business world.
His big breakthrough came with ‘bluedot’, a location technology business, established in Melbourne in 2016, that allows retailers to automate their drive through service.
Among the company’s clients are McDonalds, Transurban, Dunkin Donuts, KFC and Six Flags amusement parks in the US and Mexico.
“We started ‘bluedot’ when we saw a gap in the market and it has grown to about a hundred employees. It was a great experience and I learned a lot.” Bala said.
His latest venture, and one closest to his heart, is ‘Getmee’ an artificial intelligence (AI) platform which helps people learning English perfect their pronunciation and diction.
“In 2020 I took a break from ‘bluedot’ just as COVID was spreading through China. I realised my calling was not really building software for commercial applications,” Bala said.
“I saw people here in Australia going through the same struggles I did, learning about a new country, culture and language. And I thought ‘how could I automate some of this process through AI?’.
“That was the beginnings of ‘Getmee’. We built a prototype to help us understand patterns in someone’s speech.
“The idea was to give people awareness about here they can improve their speech and then to coach them through that while also looking at things like energy levels and tone.
“You can make a phone call through the app and get it to tell you how to clearly pronounce a word and how fast you are speaking,” he said.
Bala and his team raised $1.3 million from investors and have created a product that is now on the market.
So far, Getmee has been sold to five enterprise customers and 400 individuals but Bala says the product has significant global potential.
“We have launched it in South America and Asia, where there are millions of people wanting to learn English and we are working education providers, including AMES.
“This is really important to me because of the role AMES Australia played in my life,” Bala said