Suran Goonatilake, OBE is an academic, entrepreneur and producer. He is a visiting professor at the Department of Computer Science at University College London (UCL).^[1]

He did his undergraduate degree at the University of Sussex in Computing and Artificial Intelligence, followed by a PhD at University College London (UCL) in Machine Learning.

As a student at UCL, Goonatilake, co-founded with three fellow students, a Machine Learning company called Searchspace.^{[2][non-primary source needed]} In May 2005 Searchspace was acquired by Warburg Pincus.

He is the co-founder of several Deep Tech companies, many of which are the result of commercialising research from British Universities ^[3]

In 2005, he was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the Queen's birthday honours list, for his services to Entrepreneurship.^[4]

He founded the Centre for Fashion Enterprise^[5] in London a non-profit initiative that finances and nurtures high-growth fashion designers in London.^[6] This initiative pioneered a new model of building luxury fashion companies and drew upon practises from technology start-ups, film and music industries.^[7] Famous alumni include Erdem Moralıoğlu, Marios Schwab,^[8] Mary Katrantzou, Manish Arora, and JW Anderson.

In 2006, Goonatilake was an executive producer on the romantic comedy, Scenes of a Sexual Nature, directed by Ed Blum and starring Ewan McGregor and Tom Hardy.^[9] The film was distributed independently via The Really Honest Little Distribution Company ^[10] and premiered as the closing film to the 2006 London Raindance Film Festival.^[11]

In 2007 he was the executive producer for Luxury Unveiled,^[12][13] a documentary TV series on the world's top fashion and luxury brands including Chanel, Tiffany, Dunhill and Cartier.

Goonatilake is a co-editor of two books,

• Intelligent Systems for Finance and Business John Wiley & Sons 1995 ISBN 978-0471944041
• co-edited with Philip Treleaven Intelligent Hybrid Systems John Wiley & Sons 1995 ISBN 978-0471942429