Dilanjan Seneviratne Turns a Banker's Training Into a Company Built to Export Culture
Royal College 2010 | Suntel | HNB 2011 to 2015 | Theewra Worldwide 2012 | Pettah Effect 2018 | WYLD Global | Outright Play 2024: sixteen years in Colombo, Mumbai and back
Today, Dilanjan Seneviratne is Founder and CEO of Outright Play, the Colombo management, publishing and entertainment company he owns in full, and co-founder and Director of the agency WYLD Global. The route there runs through a telecoms sales desk, a bank's head office, a video-editing sideline and a label that carried Sri Lankan artists through three national shocks.
School and first jobs
He left Royal College, Colombo, in 2010, finishing his English-medium Commerce A-levels in August that year. In September 2010 he took his first job, at Suntel, as a marketing executive selling PABX systems.
In May 2011 he joined Hatton National Bank as a trainee banking assistant at the Head Office branch, and was later made a banking assistant. Alongside the job he studied: a Certificate in Banking and Finance from the Institute of Bankers of Sri Lanka, a Higher National Diploma in Business Management and Psychology from the American College of Higher Education, and in 2013 a bachelor's degree with first-class honours in Business Administration and Management from Middlesex University. He then became one of three management trainees selected from about 250 applicants through internal promotion, and moved into Marketing.
HNB was then working through a rebrand with Interbrand and Deloitte. He credits that exposure with training him, and his colleague Banura Sooriyapperuma, in brand thinking. He went on to complete an MBA at Mahatma Gandhi University, from 2014 to 2015.
Theewra
At the bank he began editing videos on a small laptop, then editing for other people. In 2012 he started Theewra Worldwide with Banura Sooriyapperuma, also of HNB, and served as its Chief Operating Officer. Nuwan Wijesinghe named the company and worked on its first few projects before leaving for Australia. Shanellie White joined later and became the third partner.
Early work was event photography and small gigs. By 2016 and 2017 Theewra had staff and steady clients, and his Behance portfolio, opened in June 2017 under Team Theewra, listed him as photographer, filmmaker, marketer, lyricist and educator.
He left banking in 2015. That year he met Yohani, then interning at CMA CGM in HNB Towers, and suggested she start a YouTube channel; her first video, a cover of Above & Beyond's Satellite / Stealing Time, went live on 1 March 2016.
Theewra later became WYLD Global, where Sooriyapperuma is co-founder and CEO, Shanellie White is a partner, and Dilanjan is co-founder and Director. In September 2025 the agency won 6 awards and 3 Category Bests at SLIM DIGIS in its debut year.
Stage and speech
He trained in dance and acted with Workshop Players in Evita and Jesus Christ Superstar. He also performed in Jehan Aloysius's Pyramus and Thisby, which was selected to represent Sri Lanka at the Bharat Rang Mahotsav international theatre festival in India.
He won a Toastmasters speaking competition. The training shows on conference stages, from the DMASL Digital Summit in July 2024 to She Radiates in March 2026.
Pettah Effect
From 2016 he set out to understand why Sri Lanka had produced no globally exportable artist, attending open mics and concerts across Colombo. He found school music festivals producing talent that never entered the industry, no artist development, labels that had vanished with cassette and CD sales, and releases too expensive for new artists.
Pettah Effect was his answer. The name borrows from Pettah, Colombo's market district, where every kind of person meets; any genre, any language and any background was welcome. Its vision was Elevate Everything Entertainment.
Its first video went out on 9 May 2018, his birthday: Falan Andrea singing Sam Smith's One Last Song. Theewra's crews and channels carried the output, and Red Bull Sri Lanka became a long-standing partner. By December 2020 the press was describing Pettah Effect as Yohani's label.
The shocks came in sequence: the Easter Sunday attacks of 21 April 2019, then COVID-19 from March 2020 and two years without live shows, then the 2022 economic crisis. In 2022 he moved to Mumbai with Yohani, Pettah Effect effectively stopped, and the money ran out.
India and Outright Play
In October 2021 he took Yohani to Mumbai, where a meeting with Bhushan Kumar opened the talks that led to her exclusive T-Series contract, announced on 17 March 2022. On 2 February 2023 he appeared as a co-author of a teaching case on her social media strategy in Communications of the Association for Information Systems.
Travel had sharpened a frustration. Abroad, Sri Lankans were routinely taken for Indian, yet Sri Lanka's music, sound and culture are its own, so he came home to build a company that would export them.
In 2024 he founded Outright Play, and by 16 June 2024 he was being described as its Founder and CEO.
In May 2025 he co-founded Licenced, a premium streetwear label, with Yohani and Shyamal Adikari, and serves as its Creative Director. Its first collection, Loss of Innocence, launched with NOLIMIT at Colombo City Centre on 17 May 2025.
Under Outright Play came the submission of Kella, the album he creatively produced, for Grammy consideration in October 2024; Outright Stage Volume 1 at Waters Edge on 18 January 2025; KanKalu at Colombo Lotus Tower on 27 March 2026; the Aadarei orchestral concerts on 7 and 8 August 2026; and Yohani's set closing the Moon Stage at India's Ziro Festival of Music on 25 September 2026.
