Scale Up 2026 Marks 10 Years of Global Team Performance — and the Launch of Gapstars Group

This February, Colombo hosted a milestone event in global collaboration. Scale Up 2026 marked ten years of Gapstars building high-performance embedded teams from Sri Lanka and introduced a new chapter with the formal launch of Gapstars Group.

Held from 2–6 February 2026, the week brought together more than 50 international partners representing leading European technology and finance organisations. For many, it was not their first visit. Several have spent years building embedded Sri Lankan teams that now play a central role in product innovation, enterprise systems, and financial operations across Europe and beyond.

Scale Up was not designed as a traditional conference. Instead, it functioned as a working summit – combining AI workshops, agile collaboration sessions, intercultural leadership modules, and teambuilding activities. Founders, CTOs, IT directors, and finance leaders worked side by side with their Sri Lankan counterparts to review roadmaps, refine financial structures, and accelerate delivery.

The defining announcement of the week was the launch of Gapstars Group, uniting its established technology vertical with its expanding finance capability under one integrated structure. After a decade focused on engineering and product teams, the organisation has formalised its finance vertical, embedding Sri Lankan professionals into European companies across reporting, compliance, controls, and forecasting functions.

“Our first decade was about proving that distributed engineering teams from Sri Lanka could operate at global standards,” said Hugo Hemmen, Co-Founder of Gapstars. “The next decade is about scale, across technology and finance. We are not building support functions; we are building high-performance teams that operate at the heart of our partners’ organisations.”

Throughout the week, long-standing partnerships were visible in action. The programme culminated in The Great Scale Up 2026 Gala Night, held at Cinnamon Life, Colombo, where partners, leadership teams, and employees gathered for an awards ceremony and formal celebration marking a decade of global collaboration.

Brompton, the UK-based certified B Corp and globally recognised brand, was recognised as Partner of the Year for its sustained collaboration and growth within its Sri Lankan engineering team. “What makes this partnership strong is ownership,” said Dilraj Sura, Head of Analytics for the Brompton team in Sri Lanka. “Our team is not working on isolated tasks, we’re contributing to decisions, architecture, and long-term product direction. Scale Up strengthens that alignment face-to-face, but the performance is consistent throughout the year.”

Beyond awards, the event reinforced a maturing global model defined by accountability, trust, and integration. As hybrid work becomes permanent, companies are prioritising performance and reliability over proximity, and Sri Lanka’s technical depth and communication maturity have positioned it as a strategic hub for international organisations.

Scale Up 2026 was not simply an anniversary celebration. It marked a shift from proving the distributed model to scaling it, with deeper AI capability, stronger finance integration, and a unified Group structure designed for the next decade of global growth.

It was a signal of momentum.