In the shadow of Everest, a Startup Valley begins to emerge

Towns of Nepal stare at the Himalayas. Photo credit: Xiaojun Deng.

Sandwiched between two of the world’s biggest tech ecosystems – China and India – lies a tiny nation of lofty mountains and breathtaking valleys: Nepal, which is best known as the place from where you climb Everest.

The mountain lore that has captured our imagination in books and movies hides a harsh reality on the ground though. Unlike its giant neighbors, Nepal is only now emerging from long years of political instability, economic stagnation, and natural disasters such as last year’s devastating earthquake.

But there’s change in the mountain air – and it comes from the stirrings of tech entrepreneurship.

“Words like entrepreneurship, innovation, and startups were hardly heard in Nepal not too long ago,” says Kavi Raj Joshi, who started an entrepreneur lab in 2011 in his alma mater Kathmandu University. Things have moved along since then. King’s College in Kathmandu started an MBA in entrepreneurship in 2013 and even set up an incubator.

By the following year, there was a shift from kickstarting student entrepreneurship to building startups with global aspirations. “Initially most startups were into ecommerce or attempting to solve local problems. But by 2014, we started seeing innovative startups who wanted to build products and services with global scalability,” says Kavi.

An entrepreneur could build a minimum viable product to test the market in Nepal before launching in India.

Like Backstreet Academy, a peer-to-peer travel platform that connects tourists with local hosts for unique experiences off the beaten track. It started out by helping visitors to Nepal, but now it has scaled across nine other Asian countries.

Its founders Anil and Akash Gurung and Jamon Mok graduated from Singapore Management University and worked in the Lion City before moving to Nepal and becoming entrepreneurs. There’s a growing trend of Nepalis studying and working in Singapore, India, and other places where they can pick up good tech knowhow and returning home to launch startups, says Kavi.

This prompted Kavi and his partner Sambhav Sirohiya to start Next Venture Corp for angel and seed investments a couple of years ago. It now has a co-working space and an accelerator program, and also aims to launch a VC fund soon as high net worth individuals in Nepal as well as non-resident Nepalis abroad get interested in backing Nepali startups.

Advantages of having nothing to lose

Photo credit: Asian Development Bank.

International players too are checking out the Kathmandu startup scene – once they’re able to tear their eyes away from the surrounding Himalayan mountains. This Sunday, a Next Growth Conclave event has investors coming in from India, Hong Kong, and Thailand.

One of them is Joseph Jeong, a Wall Street veteran, founder of investment consultancy firm Oracle Strategies in Hong Kong, and fintech mentor for Chinaccelerator.

New connections with India