ILLUSTRATION BY CHRISTIAN NORTHEAST
A UNICORN is the startup world’s term for a private company valued at more than a billion dollars. As of March 2026 there are over 1,300 of them worldwide, from San Francisco to Singapore, from São Paulo to Stockholm. Bangladesh has one: bKash, the mobile money company that grew from a product line into a standalone payments giant. Sri Lanka does not. India has more than a hundred. Nepal has none, and at first glance that seems easy to explain: Nepal is a small, poor, landlocked country with a small domestic market and a financial system that does not yet know how to fund early-stage companies. Of course it has no unicorns. The more interesting question is not whether Nepal can produce one in the next ten years. It is what would actually need to be true for it to happen—and how close the country is to any of those things.
Start with what exists. Nepal’s most valuable privately founded technology business is F1Soft Group: the Kathmandu-based conglomerate that owns eSewa, Nepal’s largest digital wallet with over 7m users, and Fonepay, which processes over 90% of Nepal’s digital merchant payments—estimated at over $400m for the group. Fonepay’s most recent stake transaction, in September 2025, when ten investors led by the Khetan Group acquired 22.23% of the company for Rs1.49bn, implied a Fonepay-alone valuation of Rs6.67bn ($43.6m).
These are private company estimates rather than verified market valuations; in a country with no functioning secondary market for startup equity and very few arm’s-length transactions, they should be read with appropriate scepticism.
Pathao, the ride-hailing and delivery platform that dominates Nepal’s app-based transport market, is a Bangladeshi company operating a Nepali subsidiary—a regional success story but not a Nepali one. Foodmandu, the food delivery platform founded in Kathmandu, is estimated above $40m.
What the landscape tells you is that Nepal’s technology sector has produced companies of genuine scale, without any of them breaking through to the level that would make the country a recognisable name in global venture capital.
Programiz is the case study that most honestly captures the distance between what Nepal’s startups can achieve and the structural ceiling they run into. Founded in 2011 by Punit Jajodia, Aswin Shrestha and Ranjit Bhatta, it is a programming tutorials website: unassuming in description, extraordinary in reach. More than one million people use it every month to learn Python, C, Java and similar languages, competing directly with Coursera, Pluralsight and Codecademy.
It has never raised external funding. It employs dozens of people. It is headquartered in Lalitpur and has made no effort to pursue the aggressive user-acquisition strategy that would, at its traffic levels, have attracted tens of millions of dollars from investors in almost any other city in the world. It is a profitable, bootstrapped, globally competitive product that has essentially decided not to become a startup in the conventional sense.
That conclusion, if it is the one Programiz has made, is the most diagnostic fact in Nepal’s technology sector. A company with over a million monthly users, zero external funding and a global competitive position is, from a venture-capital standpoint, the opening chapter of a spectacular story. That it has remained there for fifteen years, without apparently attracting or seeking the capital that would take it further, tells you more about Nepal’s investment environment than any government policy document.
The companies that have raised external capital and grown fast tend to share a specific characteristic: they operate in sectors where digital payment rails already exist, where NRB regulation has been extended to cover their product, and where the domestic market is big enough to sustain substantial revenue before any international expansion.
eSewa is the template: built over fifteen years, surviving on vision through the slow years and finally vindicated when COVID-19 made digital payment essential overnight. The fintech sector has since absorbed most of Nepal’s disclosed investment capital. Of the companies in it, most remain small: Khalti, eSewa’s main digital wallet competitor, merged with IME Pay in 2025 under pressure from a high cash burn rate and stagnating user growth, a consolidation that reflects the limits of the domestic market more than any failure of ambition.
The decade-long question is if Nepal can produce a company that not only solves a Nepali problem but scales the solution into a regional or global product. The honest answer is that the preconditions are not yet assembled, and assembling them means more than one thing going right simultaneously.
The market size problem is the most fundamental. A domestic market of 30m people, most of them with low purchasing power, cannot support a billion-dollar valuation on domestic revenue alone. Every company that has reached that threshold in a comparable market—bKash in Bangladesh, Grab in its early Southeast Asian markets—did so by expanding regionally before the domestic valuation could justify a billion-dollar ticket. Nepal’s geography and geopolitics complicate this. Its most natural expansion market—India—is also the most competitive technology market in South Asia, where Nepali startups would compete directly with Indian companies backed by SoftBank and Tiger Global. The window for regional expansion from Nepal is real but narrow, and it closes as Indian and Southeast Asian platforms extend their own reach.
The exit problem follows directly. A unicorn needs investors willing to pay a billion dollars for a stake, which requires those investors to believe they can eventually sell to someone willing to pay even more, or that the company can go public on an exchange that will value it at that level. Nepal’s stock exchange is dominated by banks and hydropower companies and has never hosted a technology company IPO. Going public on a foreign exchange means meeting governance, disclosure and audit standards that most Nepali startups have not begun to prepare.
The capital problem is being addressed most actively and changing most slowly. Total funding raised by Nepali startups crossed $300m in 2025, a tenfold increase from 2020. The government has launched the Alternative Development Finance Fund with Rs25bn to mobilise institutional capital. DFI money has found its way to equity funds that back technology companies.
What has not appeared is the fast, large, venture- style investment—the $20m Series A from a fund willing to lose it all—that turns a promising producct into a scaling operation
The talent problem is the most apparent. Nepal produces over 10,000 ICT graduates a year and the quality of the best of them is really competitive by regional standards. The problem is that a disproportionate share of the best ones leave: to Australia, Japan, the United States, South Korea. Every departure is a potential CTO, lead engineer or technical co-founder who is instead contributing to someone else’s unicorn story.
None of this adds up to impossibility. Nepal’s most likely path to a billion-dollar company this decade runs through a company that solves a problem present across multiple South or Southeast Asian markets—language technology, agricultural logistics, financial infrastructure for underserved communities—that raises its first significant capital from the diaspora or DFIs willing to take early-stage risk, expands regionally before it is fully ready domestically, and builds towards an exit on an Indian or American exchange.
That path exists. It is narrow. The companies best positioned to walk it are probably not the ones currently attracting the most attention in Kathmandu’s startup community. They may not yet exist.
The answer to the unicorn question is: probably not this decade, at the current trajectory. But the trajectory is changing. And the companies that get Nepal to a billion-dollar valuation in the 2030s are being built right now, by people who may not yet know that is what they are doing. ■
