Janaki Technology is a software product company well known for its SMS based service, Sparrow SMS and it’s much acclaimed application Picovico. Founded in 2007 as a normal web application and outsourcing company, it entered the Nepal SMS Value Added Service (VAS) Market in 2010. It harnessed its experience of catering to the software needs of its national and multinational clients and built ‘Sparrow SMS’in 2010 as a platform to facilitatevarious SMS based services. 

 

SMS services and VAS was not a new thing in Nepal by then, “however, we were unique in our implementation and use of latest technology. Our strong technical team worked hard to make it better than other existing SMS services,” Amit Agrawal, CEO of the company says while elaborating on the success mantra of the service.

 

The company served multinational clients inside and outside the country and Sparrow SMS has received national and international awards. “We are still focusing on innovating our products and there is a long way to go,” Agrawal said.

 

In 2011 the company rolled out Picovico, an application to convert photos into video. The product was selected for seed funding in 2011 by ‘the Morpheus Ventures’ India. A year later, the Chile Government selected it for "StartupChile" programme awarding it equity free funding of 40,000 USD. 

 

Agrawal shares that the company focused on research and development for making the products and therefore remained in loss during its initial years. But since than the company has been in profit and presently its annual growth rate has been between 15 to 20%.

 

Reflecting on challenges that the company faced as a startup, Agrawal shares that they also went through common problems faced other businesses in Nepal like load-shedding, delayed and multi-layered government processes, shortage of talented workforce and unfriendly business policies. “Not having proper startup-ecosystem in the country was another big problem, when we started,” he said.  “Lack of industry support from government, angel investors and startup accelerators along with unclear laws about IT industry and small market size are other major problems especially for Nepali tech companies,” he shared. The company has gained substantial popularity among local clients and is presently doing market research to expand its reach beyond Nepal, Agrawal said adding that the company is working on pushing Picovico in the global market, especiallyin Europe and America.           (By Upashana Neupane)

 

Ujjwal Chapagain, managing director of The Himalayan Rabbit Farm took up the risk of leaving a secure job and entering into an unchartered business terrain of commercial rabbit meat production. Such a business is still little known about across the country. When Chapagain thought of it as a business venture, he was questioned more than assured to take the risk. But he succeeded. 

 

He thought that a small risk taken could help in the sectorial as well as his personal growth. In the very beginning, he had decided his business venture will be a social enterprise rather than a purely commercial. Established in 2012, the venture has provided 100 small farmers with an extra source of income in the form ofrabbit farming.Along with that six farmers have been producing rabbits on a larger scale, following the footsteps and guidelines of Chapagain.

 

Chapagain was a jobholder in the non-governmental sector. He left the job and invested all his savings in starting up an organic vegetable shop at Jhamsikhel and an integrated farm in Bhaktapur in partnership with some friends. Unfortunately, the project did not succeed, the cause of which he alludes to lack of teamwork with his business partners. After this, he found himself at the crossroads forced to choose between doing business and reverting to being a jobholder. He decided to stay.

 

He explored various business prospects and finally decided to start rabbit farming. He took the decision after figuring out that rabbit meat had high demand in the market, as it had remained unnoticed as a livestock farming option and therefore had no substantial competitors. Besides that, another major reason, which attracted his attention, was the fact that rabbit meat is considered to be healthy food and as people were being oriented towards healthy meat options, he thought that he could cater to this consumer sentiment. 

 

After finalizing his new business idea, Chapagain faced the problem of capital shortage. As he had spent all his savings in the previous venture, the only option left to him was borrowing from a bank. Considering the failure of his earlier business venture, it was hard to convince family members to put up family land as collateral for acquiring bank loan for his new venture. He convinced them and he acquired a bank loan and started rabbit farming in partnership.

 

The company has around 500 rabbits at its rabbit farm in Balambu, Kathmandu. For breeding, there are around 100 females. It is planning to upgrade the existing breeding centre into a modern one for breeding high yielding rabbit breeds. Presently, it procures 300 to 400 kilograms of rabbit meat every month from farmers situated in different parts of the country. Chapagain says that this quantity is consumed in the market, which primarily consists of hotels and restaurants. 

 

 

Within two years, Himalayan Rabbit Farm has succeeded to put rabbit meat as an option on menus. The success stems from the fact that people, who have tasted it, have loved it. Chapagain feels that interest towards the meat has been growing and he has been continuously working to boost it. To increase customer attraction and establish rabbit meat eating culture, the company had provided free tasting samples to visitors of Food, Drinks and Hospitality Exhibition held in September this year.The company has been working on innovating rabbit meat dishes in association with Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management (NATHM), so that hotels and restaurants could replicate them.

 

On the social side, Chapagain has been constantly working with local farmers to help them in rearing rabbits and thereby generating additional household income. The company provides training on rabbit keeping, managing and shade building for rabbit farming to farmer, among other support. 

 

As of now, farmers in Mayagdi, Rasuwa, Sindhuli, Dolakha, Nawalparas and Kathmandu have taken up rabbit farming. He says that famers from other areas have been also showing interests.

 

In the past two years, Chapagain has made a huge leap in introducing a totally new area to livestock farming in Nepal and now he wishes to establish rabbit farming as a national programme, similar to that of pig, goat and poultry farming. Along with this he wishes to make rabbit meat easily available in the market for purchase. To this end he has plans up his sleeves to set up outlets for selling rabbit meat products in places with higher market volume.

 

Madhukar KC, founder of Matribhumi Urja Pvt Ltd invented a fuel-efficient wood fire stove that is being commercially developed. Recently, he has designed eight different burners and presented them to the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre, as requested. These designs include skewer stove, high-altitude stove, portable stove and bio-gas stove among others for household and commercial use.

 

CB Urja Pvt Ltd has been granted the production and marketing rights for the wood fireportable stovesKC innovated. It started production since mid-May 2014 from its Balaju Industrial Estate based factory.

 

The government has recently decided to provide five ropanis of land in Chitwan to set up a factory produce burners at a larger scale, KC informed. He is optimistic that the decision would help to develop his venture. His journey so far has been challenging, especially during the research stage, as he had to personally finance his research and development works. Sharing his experience, KC complains of banks and financial institution’s unwillingness to take intellectual property as collateral for providing loans. In lack of loans, he has been managing investments with the profit earned by selling the products.

 

KC, originally a resident of Pyuthan had moved to Chitwan and it is where he first introduced the product to the public. The first prototype of woodfire stove was developed after a long series of trial and errors on coal stove. A successful prototype was developed in the 33rd attempt. For over 13 years he has been devoting all his time in developing the product. Coming now, he has improvised his products to use bio-mass. KC says that the performance of his stoves is higher than the government benchmark claiming that his stoves scored 29 in the benchmark against the official benchmark of 25. KC plans to develop products that can score around 33 to 35 in terms of performance and fuel efficiency.  Presently he has been working fuel-efficient stoves to be used with bio-gas and liquefiedpetroleum gas (LPG).

 

KC’s stove, besides firewood, can use biomass such as pine leaves, seeds of Schima Wallichi (Chilaune) tree, seeds of Hog Plum (Lapsi) and other bio wastages, which generally remain unused, as fuel source. A candy factory in Parbat entirely uses Hog Plum seeds to fuel the stove. This unique portable stove uses two watt computer fan for air supply. The insulated version of the stove does not heat the room as it is covered by mud, specially designed for the Terai region. The fixed stoves installed in rural households also have similar mechanism and provide better flames while emitting lower smoke. KC says that these stoves can be customised to fit in the requirements of an individual household. This mechanism makes it fuel-efficient, environment and user friendly while ensuring smoke free kitchen.Along with that stove uses parts made of recycled metals supplied by the Butwal based Metal Craft Pvt Ltd.

 

 

 KC is the first to incubate at the Business Incubation Programme of the Department of Cottage and Small Industries (DoCSI). In 2009, KC was recognised by National Academy for Science and Technology (NAST) with an award for developing efficient stoves. He was also awarded with Surya Nepal Asha Social Entrepreneurship Award in 2013. After being awarded with the awards, KC realized the buzz that his business had created in the market. He has registered patent rights for his innovations. Presently he has been trying to acquire international patent rights for his LPG and bio-gas burners and the DoCSI has pledged assistance in this endeavour. 

As crowd-sourcing and cloud-working are becoming the next big things in the global outsourcing market, new companies are flocking into this lucrative business. CloudFactory, a Kathmandu-based startup has emerged among the frontrunners in the global crowd-sourcing market. The company, founded in 2010 by a Canadian tech entrepreneur, Mark Sears, is rapidly expanding its foothold in Nepal and beyond. CloudFactory came into existence when Sears came to Nepal on a vacation with his wife in 2008.  

 

The company basically is a web-based outsourcing platform that hires cloud-workers who can work from their internet enabled locations. CloudFactory's clients are those who need big data services such as data entry, data processing, data collection along with audio/video transcription, categorization, web research and image tagging. The tasks are broken down into sets of "microtasks" which are then distributed to its pool of online workers who complete their work in the "virtual assembly lines". CloudFactory currently employs 3,200 workers from Nepal and across the world, who process over a million tasks per day. 

 

 

In 2008, we were a software development company building web and mobile applications for North American and European clients. Many of them started needing data entry related work and kept asking if we could hire people in Nepal and do it. We kept saying no because we were a high-end software boutique and not a data entry company. At the same time we had been living in Nepal for a year and only hiring talented computer engineering fresher.  During the period we met many other talented Nepalis looking for an opportunity. The major existing solution was Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AMT) - a crowd sourcing internet marketplace. But its enterprise-grade was not enough for our clients and we faced many quality related problems. So we started CloudFactory on January 1, 2010 as a technology platform to cater to the big demand and supply of online workers and haven't looked back since then. 

 

 The shift from a software development company to a product company back in Jan 2010 was a major turning point. Another major turning point was in May 2012 when we hired our first 25 cloud workers in Nepal. Up until then we were a tech/engineering company building a platform and now we had to learn how to recruit, train and manage large numbers of data operators.

 

While there are many young, talented people in Nepal there are less senior, experienced engineers and managers. We are a young team and in many ways I think that has been a good thing, we have learned a lot and grown together. I am so proud of the things we have accomplished to get to this point and I look around and see that I am surrounded by some of the finest young leaders in Nepal - it is amazing to see the growth and maturity that comes from being part of a growing international startup like this.

 

Our team, technology and traction are the keys to us for raising investments. This latest round was definitely related to our participation in a business accelerator in the US where I got to meet and pitch to a lot of great investors at the end of the 7-month program.

 

Large-scale data entry, audio/video transcription, web research, image tagging and categorization are our major projects. Companies come to us with large amounts of routine and repetitive work that we can break down in small tasks that can be partially automated but require people as well to complete many of them. 

 

 While we have not received any formal help from the government we have very much appreciated informal support from people like Radhesh Pant at Nepal Investment Board. While their focus is mostly on the top hydropower investments in Nepal but he understands and appreciates the opportunity for companies like CloudFactory to provide job creation in Nepal. As a landlocked country we need to be thinking more about how we can accelerate the shift to a knowledge economy. For that ICT should be higher on the priority of the government. Even so, the most important thing the government could do is stay out of the way of ICT growth in Nepal and focus on not being a hindrance and let entrepreneurs continue to innovate from their internet-enabled residences across the Kathmandu valley.

 

Tech startups in Nepal are mostly just freelancers working together in small teams of 2-20 people. They work on the early development side of web and mobile applications but rarely get the opportunity to build a full business by bringing products to market themselves. We need some more product startups to go through the full lifecycle to see some wins on the international stage. We will then have the capital and experience to start the second wave of tech startups in Nepal. I see this happening in the next 3-5 years. Until then many will continue to get experience on the engineering/product development side by building other people's products. The future is bright, Nepali startup scene is heading slowly but surely in a good direction.

Metro Vibes, is a startup company that specializes in web design, development and hosting, email services, graphic design, domain registration, and providing IT consultancy and internet marketing services. After working for over five years with other tech companies, Anil Basnet, Chief Operating Officer of Metro Vibes, felt the need to establish his own IT company. He shared the idea with his three friends and they conceived Metro Vibes. 

 

Company’s growth curve has been pretty stable and has improved substantially since its establishment. Presently 22 employees are working with company and Basnet said more would be joining in the near future. “We work hard to meet projects deadline. We get up at 4 in the morning for our venture Metro Tarkari and ensure that the delivery is made within the set time frame,” Basnet said while elaborating on the growth factors.

 

Though the venture faced financial crisis in its initial days, lack of skilled manpower was and remains the major problem. “We have unique concepts, required finance and latest technological equipments, but there is scarcity of skilled manpower who can translate our venture ideas into actions,” stated Basnet. Another problem is the absence of government policy on ecommerce. “We are confused about the method of handling online transactions,” he added.

 

Starting the Merotarkari.com, an online vegetable ecommerce system, was one of the most prominent turning points for the company. This venture boosted the company’s working style and contributed in its expansion. The concept of virtual receptionist was another unique idea in office automation that became a major turning point for the company.

 

The company started with five clients in the initial phase and coming now it is serving more than 120 trustable clients that range from national to international boundaries. Its core products are mterotarkari.com, metrofever.com, metro bulk email service, and metro biometric attendance system. (By Angila Sharma)

 

11Beep is startup company, which since recently have been gaining popularity as a social network that provides platform to individuals to enjoy unrestrained personal freedom of expression.11Beep is a network built specially for mobilephones that doesn’t keep any digital history. It lets you share freely what is on your mind with your friends without worrying about any digital footprint.

 

11Beep came into operation on November 2013 following Bimal Maharjan’s, the CEO of the company, competitive analysis of the market to find the company’s startup idea. Maharjan had conceived the idea after analysing various posts on different social networking sites.

 

"People only share trendy thoughts on social networking sites but hesitate to share thoughts that might be considered or taken in negative light by their social networking peers. 11Beep provides anonymity to individuals and emancipates them from the fear of being identified thereby enabling them to share their thoughts spontaneously without any restraints, says Maharjan, CEO of 11Beep. Thus this network paves way for individuals to share their thoughts, whatever their nature, whenever it strikes to their mind. Besides anonymity, this network has another cool feature of deleting all the post after certain time frame. This feature enables that the individual does not leave digital footprint behind for others to trace. Fundamentally, it is a social network with quite higher levelof security.

 

The company has been running by five-member team – with only CEO committing his full time to it and others helping him out on part time basis. 11Beep is preparing to launch another product in the market but before launching it, its been focusing on making the existing product more user friendly and winning user confidence. 

 

"Our startup is based on the idea of a loosing algorithm and is designed for maintaining anonymity. We don't want to go wrong anywhere. We are working on making our technology strong and making it securer. We have required technical competencies and expertise and are very happy with our work and knowing that we are on the track of gaining our objective," says Maharjan.

 

The company is sustaining through its own resources and has not got any support from government. "Fortunately I don't have to pay my team so that is a relief .We don't require huge investment and our biggest need at the moment is human capital, we are investing on our own so right now we don't feel the need for funding but in the next phase, we will need huge investment," he added.

 

As a part of its aim, Beep11 believes in building something which people can make good use of. But being a start up it has its own woes too. "Our society in not built to encourage tech entrepreneurs and as in the initial phase they don’t earn much to sustain, it is very difficult for startups to establish in Nepal,” Maharjan said. 

Sasto Deal (SD) is one of the prominent rising stars of online retail shops in Nepal. The company was started almost 3 years ago with the aim of switching offline Nepali market to online and providing best deals. Upon returning from the US, Amun Thapa, SD’s CEO, decided to do some business and began to search for ideas that would sell. It did not take long to Amun to realize that Nepali people had been wasting some really useful hours in shopping. “I found people lingering to different places in search of different items. I asked myself if everyone was doing the same and the answer was yes. I was compelled to seek for a solution and I knew there was one. However, the sad part was that no one was doing anything about it,” says Thapa. He realized that he could save people this hours by taking it online and making it available on their desktop or mobile phones. The idea was simple but he needed people who could translate his vision into reality. This brought him in touch with his schoolmates who were pursuing their degree in the IT field. They worked around the idea and gave birth to Sasto Deal. The initial phase was a bumpy ride as they had problems in making deals. It was difficult for them to make people believe in online business. “People laughed at our ideas and we had to go out to the market begging for deals. But now, the same people are begging us to feature their products,” says Thapa proudly. The company believes that the initial phase was difficult because online business was a new term to this part of the world and also because the rulers find it difficult to trust the new comers. The company believes that they are grown large.“I would probably say the growth rate is over 100% right now, this is not only due to the fact that the company is outperforming but also due to the fact that we are in the e-commerce business and with every single product, our chances for growth increases,” Avash K.C, CO-CEO of Sasto Deal, said.

The Internet has changed the way companies do their business and tourism sector is no exception to it. Himalayan Wonders, a Nepali travel startup, also harnessed the latest developments made in the field of online technology and took all its business online. Founded in 2013, the company provides affordable tours and trekking packages to Nepal. This online portal is packed with informative contents and pictures and travellers can choose and book any tour package online through any Internet enabled device such as smartphone and tablet from anywhere in the world.Himalayan Wonders came into existence when an American geologist Dr David Urmann and his Brazilian friend Pablo Souto Maior suggested Nishes Thapato start his own company. Dr Urmann has been visiting Nepal since the mid-90s' for research on climate change and in credited for establishing the company. Dr. Urmann and another Co-founder, Maior, promote the startup in the global market while Thapa heads the Nepal operations of the company. The company has been receiving overwhelming response from travellers and trekkers around the globe. Within a year it has received five-star rating from Trip Advisor and many positive reviews from its satisfied customers.  

 

 

 

I was born in Tripureshwor VDC of Dhading and tourists visiting Ganesh Himal pass through it. Those tourists always fascinated me and it is during these days that my interest of doing something in tourism industry developed. In 1998 I came to Kathmandu and started working in the tourism sector. I worked for different people and gained industry experience that one must have in order to thrive in this booming industry. Dr David Urmann, an American friend of mine, suggested me to establish my own travel company. With his and his Brazilian friend Pablo Souto Maior constant help, we established the company in 2013. 

 

Since its inception, we have never looked back. Our business is growing every year. With the end of the decade long insurgency, the tourism and hospitality industry has been prospering. If this continues, I am hopeful of maintaining the existing healthy growth rate.

 

We have not faced major problems till date. Our business so far has been smooth with tremendous support from staffs, friends and families. However, events such as general strikes and political instability in the country, have always posed to be a big threat. In the past, we have suffered financial losses due to such condition. 

 

We received bank loans to meet our initial investment requirements. In due course of time as the company started to grow, I borrowed money from friends and even used my personal savings to make further investment. We keep track of every penny that goes out as expenditure and comes in as earning. We keep our books up-to-date and this has become the success mantra of the company.

 

We have not received any help from the government.  If government agencies show interest in us, we would be glad to work together for the growth of this industry. Trekking Agencies Association of Nepal (TAAN) has provided us substantial help in promoting our business at the international level.