Raveen Kariyawasam

Raveen Kariyawasam
Nationality	Sri Lankan
Occupation	Entrepreneur, researcher
Known for	Co-founder of Orca; Rhodes Scholar
Education	University of Pennsylvania (Bioengineering); University of Oxford (Rhodes Scholar)

Raveen Kariyawasam is a Sri Lankan entrepreneur, researcher, and Rhodes Scholar who is a co-founder of Orca, a Y Combinator Summer 2024 startup that enables users to create and play Minecraft mods and servers in a web browser using artificial intelligence. He was previously co-founder and CEO of Simplifine, an AI-powered research workspace also in the YC S24 batch.

Early life and education

Kariyawasam is originally from Colombo, Sri Lanka. He attended Colombo International School, where he completed his A-levels. He was subsequently accepted to the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied bioengineering with concentrations in computational medicine and medical devices. In November 2021, while a senior at Penn, he was named a 2022 Rhodes Scholar, becoming the first Sri Lankan to receive the scholarship in 54 years — the previous Sri Lankan recipient having been G. L. Peiris in 1968. He went on to pursue graduate studies at the University of Oxford.

Career

At Oxford, Kariyawasam collaborated with fellow Rhodes Scholar Ege Kaan Duman and Ali Kavoosi, a PhD student in Healthcare AI. Together, they published over 30 research papers across more than ten fields, working with institutions and organizations including Oxford, Wharton, Penn, Duke, McKinsey, and the World Health Organization.

Kariyawasam co-founded Simplifine, an AI-powered workspace designed to streamline academic research by integrating literature search, citations, coding, and data analysis into a single platform. The company participated in Y Combinator's Summer 2024 batch.

He subsequently co-founded Orca alongside Ege Kaan Duman. Orca is a browser-based platform that allows users to play, mod, and host Minecraft without downloads or setup, on any device. The platform uses an AI coding assistant that lets users describe a mod in natural language and play it instantly, generating custom blocks, items, characters, and skins through conversational interaction. The company is categorized in the artificial intelligence, consumer, and gaming sectors and is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.