IMAGE: IMPACT HUB KATHMANDU
HERE IS A detail that tells you most of what you need to know about Nepal’s incubator scene: Biruwa Ventures, the country’s pioneering startup incubator, eventually stopped incubating startups and turned itself into a consulting firm instead, Biruwa Advisors. Antarprerana, another early player that launched its own incubation programme called Nava Udhyamshala, made roughly the same move, pivoting into entrepreneurship-development consulting. Two of the names usually credited with founding Nepal’s startup-support ecosystem both eventually concluded that the steadier business was charging fees for advice, instead of nursing early-stage companies towards sustainability. That should give anyone pause before assuming the bootcamp model works.
It’s not that incubators are pointless everywhere: they’re not and the global startup failure rate they’re trying to beat is really brutal: some 90% of startups eventually fail, about a tenth in their first year alone, with the bulk of the carnage hitting in years two through five.
Incubators exist because mentorship as well as capital access and a decent network are supposed to shift those odds. The trouble in Kathmandu is fundamental, and it starts with what the programmes actually sell.
Enterprise Business Accelerator, one of the more established names, runs a three-month programme that costs Rs250,000 to join and requires applicants to already have at least two years of operating history and some real traction before they’re even eligible. That’s not really an incubator for an idea. It’s a paid finishing school for small businesses that have already survived the toughest part on their own, capped off with a Demo Day trip to Amsterdam or London.
Even the policy side of this has muddied the basics. Through recent amendments to the Industrial Enterprise Regulation, the government formally defined a “startup” as a firm under 10 years old with an annual turnover under Rs150m. Yet a study by the Policy Research Institute, a local think tank, highlighted that by basing the definition purely on age and revenue limits rather than tech-driven scalability or disruptive innovation, the line between an ordinary small business and a high-growth startup remains blurred.
That ambiguity matters because MSMEs make up some 90% of enterprises in developing countries generally; contribute 22% of Nepal’s GDP, and employ around 1.7m people here. Any programme targeted at high-potential startups specifically keeps getting absorbed into the much larger, much more generic project of supporting small business in general, which is a perfectly worthy goal but not the same one.
There’s also an ambition problem that’s tough to fix with a training curriculum. One industry commentator quoted in a piece by HRM Nepal, a media outlet, put it bluntly: unlike Indian startups built to serve the whole South Asian market, or Singaporean ones built for the wider Asian region, “Nepali startups often confine their ambitions within the boundaries of Kathmandu or, at most, limit their scope to areas within the Ring Road in Kathmandu.” A bootcamp can teach a founder how to pitch. It can’t easily teach them to think bigger than the market they were trained to imagine.
Then there’s the chasm between how the scene describes itself and how outsiders measure it. One recent roundup of Nepali founders claims total startup funding crossed $300m, with Pathao alone valued above $200m. StartupBlink, an independent global ecosystem tracker, sees a far more grounded baseline value of $1.5bn for the entire national ecosystem. Interestingly, its Global Startup Ecosystem Index Report 2026highlights that Kathmandu has shot up 99 spots to rank 426th in the world, logging an ecosystem growth rate of nearly 96%—making Nepal the world’s fastest-growing “contender ecosystem” on paper.
Yet StartupBlink indexes fewer than 100 active, formalized tech startups across the country. Both of those narratives exist at the same time. The numbers are exploding due to a tiny handful of high-performing outliers, and not a thriving baseline of bootcamp graduates. That contrast between the inside story and the outside measurement is, in its own way, the whole illusion in miniature.
What actually succeeded tells its own story, too. Foodmandu, Hamrobazar and Hamropatro get cited again and again as Nepal’s genuine startup wins, and the people who built them are consistently described as ordinary middle-class entrepreneurs rather than graduates of any particular bootcamp. None of the sourcing on these companies credits a formal incubator with making the difference. They seem to have happened around the ecosystem rather than because of it.
Nepal’s latest budget has acknowledged some of this by allocating Rs730m into direct, low-interest startup loans (following a massive Rs1bn deployment the previous fiscal cycle handled by the Industrial Enterprise Development Institute) rather than routing money through accelerators at all. This direct credit strategy triggered immense domestic volume, pulling in over 10,200 project proposals. Industry voices, including the one quoted above, think that’s a mistake: government money, they argue, should flow through incubators rather than straight to founders because nearly 99% of un-mentored early-stage ventures still collapse within a year. Maybe.
But if the incubators keep discovering that incubation alone doesn’t pay their own bills, handing them the money doesn’t really answer the question. It just moves it one floor up. ■
