On the floor of a recent IT fair NAS-IT Expo 2025 in Kathmandu, the energy was palpable. Attendees in jeans and hoodies jostled past venture hopefuls and corporate executives, drawn to stalls displaying home-grown software, from human-resources platforms and AI chatbots to digital maps and civic apps. It was a glimpse of an industry that, though small, hums with ambition. Far from the global hubs of Silicon Valley or Shenzhen, Nepal’s technologists are attempting to build a modern digital economy from scratch.
That ambition is still more promise than power, though. Most exhibitors are tiny firms, bootstrapped by founders working from shared apartments or repurposed cafés. Yet their goals are expansive: to automate HR management, create Nepali alternatives to Google Maps and export software services worldwide. The unifying refrain is “build in Nepal, sell to the world”. The obstacle, as nearly every founder concedes, is how to move beyond proof of concept. The hurdles, such as weak infrastructure and an uncertain regulatory environment, remain high.
Some ventures are already mapping the path forward. Job Easy, a job portal competing with older domestic rivals, sells employers unlimited access to CVs and hands-on HR support, a modest innovation in a sluggish labour market. Rigo HR, founded in 2021, automates payroll and appraisal systems for over 800 Nepali firms; it is also eyeing international clients. These are not glamorous businesses but they hint at a maturing software-as-a-service (SaaS) scene that seeks to monetise reliability rather than hype.
Others look outward from the start. DealSurf, a platform enabling digital creators to sell downloadable content through eSewa or bank transfers, already counts users from Brazil and America to the Philippines and India. Its model—“passive income for creators”—illustrates how Nepali code can travel more easily than Nepali goods. Yet success abroad means you need to have credibility, a harder export than software itself. Foreign customers still hesitate to trust unfamiliar brands from a low-income country with limited cyber protections.
Some firms pursue a different kind of localisation. Galli Maps, a Nepali alternative to Google Maps, charts the “galli-galli”—the narrow alleys that define Kathmandu’s geography but confound global mapping engines. Its service, complete with house numbers and local events, shows how technology can adapt to cultural grain rather than erase it. Another startup, Alpas Software, built a civic-service app for Lalitpur city that lets residents report fires or garbage collection delays. Such projects display a pragmatic public spirit: digitisation as the modern broom of local government.
The fair also featured glimpses of the next wave. One booth promoted an AI voice assistant for customer service; another showed a combined energy-monitoring and security-camera system; a third offered cybersecurity audits and “ethical hacking” for banks. These may seem small experiments yet collectively they signal that Nepali developers are moving beyond basic web design.
Business leaders spy opportunities in this shift. Vishnu Agrawal of MAW Group, a conglomerate spanning automobiles and IT, argues that the country’s cost advantages like cheap labour and power and office space could attract foreign outsourcing partnerships. With the right collaboration, he says, Nepal could do for code what Bangladesh did for textiles: provide affordable capacity to global firms. The comparison flatters Nepal but contains truth. A developer in Kathmandu costs a fraction of one in Bangalore or Manila, yet English proficiency and technical standards are improving.
The domestic ecosystem remains disjointed, for now. The country lacks, among other things, access to early-stage finance and coherent government support. Payment gateways still struggle to connect with international systems, limiting export revenue. The best engineers tend to leave for the Gulf or freelance for foreign clients. Government procurement is slow; internet outside the capital is unreliable. These constraints explain why Nepal’s IT industry, despite its energy, still contributes little to GDP.
Even so, structural weaknesses have bred a certain ingenuity. Startups operate frugally, hire early and ship quickly. AI tools are repurposed for small businesses; civic apps run on open-source code; and SaaS firms design globally priced products from modest offices. True, it is easy for bold ideas to tip over into foolishness, but so was it in Vietnam’s or Bangladesh’s early tech days. As those economies show, sustained government backing and consistent export policy, as well as links between universities and industry, can turn scattered experiments into clusters of competence.
For Nepal, the shift underway is psychological as much as economic. “IT work” used to mean outsourcing for foreign firms or low-paying freelance jobs. Today it increasingly means building one’s own products. The fair’s buzz came less from any single innovation than from this change in ambition: young developers now want to create and own their place in the digital economy. It is the same transition every emerging tech hub faces when local talent meets global aspiration.
The challenge now is scale. Entrepreneurs must think beyond the narrow domestic market, designing from day one for global users and dollar revenues while leveraging local costs. That means you need technical talent as well as brand credibility, something earned through reliability and support. For a generation raised on outsourcing, that may be the hardest code to write.
If Nepal manages it, it could become more than a low-cost coding outpost. Its young developers would form part of a wider South Asian software belt linking Dhaka, Bangalore and Ho Chi Minh City, a network of digital nations exporting intellect instead of labour. The journey will be uneven. But in the crowded halls of Kathmandu’s IT fair, the outlines of that future were already visible on glowing laptop screens. ■