Breaking News
Natasha
Natasha
Jun 12 2026
49The company has made its products, delivery and checkout available to AI assistants, and invited local developers to build shopping agents on top of it.
Kapruka Holdings PLC (CSE: KPHL) has become the first technology company in Sri Lanka to run a public Model Context Protocol (MCP) server. The move makes its product catalogue, delivery and checkout available directly to AI agents, and the company has invited Sri Lankan developers to build on it through a competition called the Kapruka Agent Challenge.
The server is live at mcp.kapruka.com and listed on the official global MCP registry. MCP is an open standard, introduced by Anthropic and now used across the AI industry, that lets assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT carry out tasks in other systems rather than only describe them. What it means in practice is that an AI agent anywhere in the world can now search Kapruka's products, check delivery to a Sri Lankan address, place a guest order with a secure payment link, and track it, all through a normal conversation.
The timing is deliberate. Much of the technology industry expects shopping to move toward what it calls agentic commerce, where people increasingly rely on AI assistants to find, compare and buy things for them. For that to work, the assistant needs platforms it can actually transact with. By making its systems available to agents now, Kapruka puts itself among the first stores those assistants can use, ahead of others in the local market.
To show the platform working in the open, and to encourage developers to build on it, Kapruka launched the Kapruka Agent Challenge. It invites Sri Lankan developers to create the most useful and creative AI shopping agent on the platform, with an Apple M4 Mac Mini for the winner. Developers across the country have already signed up, and working demos are coming in, including full-screen chat shopping experiences, several of them able to converse in Sinhala and Tanglish and take a customer from a first request through to checkout.
The MCP also extends the company's asset-light strategy on the demand side. It makes Kapruka's main growth areas, Partner Central (its third-party marketplace), the Services Platform, and Cross Border (its USD e-distribution business on Amazon US, UK and Canada), reachable by AI agents at little additional cost, both locally and overseas.
“We have spent two years re-adjusting the business for AI, and this is about getting ready for what comes next,” said Dulith Herath, Chairman and CEO of Kapruka Holdings PLC. “Shopping is starting to move from people clicking through websites to AI assistants doing it for them. We have made Kapruka one of the first stores in this part of the world that those assistants can actually buy from. Rather than keep it in-house, we opened it up and asked Sri Lanka's developers to show us what they can build with it.”
The platform was built at low cost, in line with the company's capital-light approach, and it gives Kapruka real optionality for the years ahead: an early position in agentic commerce, the start of a developer community around its platform, and a way for AI agents anywhere to transact on its systems in both rupees and dollars.
The Kapruka Agent Challenge runs until the end of June 2026 and is judged by the company's engineering team. The MCP server is free and open to any developer today at mcp.kapruka.com
To show the platform working in the open, and to encourage developers to build on it, Kapruka launched the Kapruka Agent Challenge. It invites Sri Lankan developers to create the most useful and creative AI shopping agent on the platform, with an Apple M4 Mac Mini for the winner. Developers across the country have already signed up, and working demos are coming in, including full-screen chat shopping experiences, several of them able to converse in Sinhala and Tanglish and take a customer from a first request through to checkout.
The MCP also extends the company's asset-light strategy on the demand side. It makes Kapruka's main growth areas, Partner Central (its third-party marketplace), the Services Platform, and Cross Border (its USD e-distribution business on Amazon US, UK and Canada), reachable by AI agents at little additional cost, both locally and overseas.
"We have spent two years rebuilding the business, and this is about getting ready for what comes next," said Dulith Herath, Chairman and CEO of Kapruka Holdings PLC. "Shopping is starting to move from people clicking through websites to AI assistants doing it for them. We have made Kapruka one of the first stores in this part of the world that those assistants can actually buy from. Rather than keep it in-house, we opened it up and asked Sri Lanka's developers to show us what they can build with it."
The platform was built at low cost, in line with the company's capital-light approach, and it gives Kapruka real optionality for the years ahead: an early position in agentic commerce, the start of a developer community around its platform, and a way for AI agents anywhere to transact on its systems in both rupees and dollars.
The Kapruka Agent Challenge runs until the end of June 2026 and is judged by the company's engineering team. The MCP server is free and open to any developer today at mcp.kapruka.com.
