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SIMI, A PROGRAM that turns a sentence into a whiteboard video, is named after Simikot, the remote north-western village where its co-founder, Sudip Rokaya, grew up. Twelve days after launch it had 4,000 users, 187 of whom paid. They included small businesses in Kentucky and Florida; pet daycares use it to explain dog vaccinations to their clients. Its maker, Lamina Labs, is in San Francisco. The Nepali Times reported in June that it was the first all-Nepali start-up funded by Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley accelerator, and that the first investor it met at the accelerator’s demo day offered the whole $3m it was seeking.
The company has two employees: Mr Rokaya, who is on leave from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Kartikesh Mishra, who holds a master’s degree from the same place. Mr Rokaya has called artificial-intelligence coding agents a “force multiplier” for founders; the pair’s own history bears him out. This is both the good news and the catch of the new kind of work. A company that two people can build is not a company that employs thousands. The founders say they now plan to hire engineers; Mr Rokaya also warns that perhaps 1,000 people are chasing the same idea.
The old route to a wage has narrowed. Between the start of the Gulf war and mid-September the Department of Foreign Employment issued 52% fewer new labour approvals for Gulf jobs than a year earlier. Each year some 500,000 young Nepalis reach working age, according to the World Bank. And the economy grew by only 3.85% in 2025-26. The usual answer, a plane ticket to a construction site or a hotel kitchen, has become less reliable.
An answer is growing silently at home, in work that is sold abroad by the internet. The Nepal Association of Software and IT Services estimates that exports of IT services reached about $1bn in 2025, and the Nepal Chamber of Industries IT Council counts more than 100 firms that export formally and employ over 80,000 people. The official numbers capture much less, because foreign clients often send the money labelled as remittances. The work is rarely glamorous: software for Australian lenders, data analysis for American hospitals. In March 20 Nepali artificial-intelligence and technology ventures finished a six-month programme backed by the US embassy and run with the American Chamber of Commerce in Nepal, whose members include SecurityPal AI and Fusemachines.
The government has noticed. The budget of May 29th offered a 50% income-tax exemption on IT export earnings and full tax relief on shares given to IT employees. It promised a law formalising remote work for Nepalis employed by foreign firms, and a sovereign AI computing centre in Kathmandu that would rent processing chips to start-ups at concessional rates. It also set aside nearly Rs4bn for science, technology and innovation. Revenue from selling shares in Nepal Telecom, due by mid-January 2027, is meant to help pay for Nepal’s “tech hub”. Industry groups have asked whether freelancers and small start-ups will find any of this easy to claim.
The record gives reason for caution. One analysis in June estimated that 99% of the ventures that received subsidised government loans had closed within a year, and argued that the money had gone to small shops and restaurants rather than to firms that could grow. The computing centre is meant to run on hydropower, yet the Bhotekoshi flood in August damaged 13 hydropower projects. The year’s best-known success was also built in California. Mr Mishra has said that one reason he went to the United States was to learn things he could not learn in Nepal.
That is the argument for hope and its limit. Nepali talent can now reach customers in Kentucky without leaving the country, and the founders themselves say so; the tools that let two people do the work of a team also make it cheaper to try. The Nepal Association of Software and IT Services has promised a survey by the end of the year that should show how big the export business really is. The remote-work law will show whether a Nepali can legally work for a San Francisco start-up from a village in the hills. A village in the north-west gave its name to a product that sells in Kentucky. The next one will need engineers and Nepal will have to decide whether they are hired there. ■
