At 10:00 p.m. in San Francisco, it’s 11:45 the next morning in Kathmandu, Nepal. And for AI security startup, SecurityPal, those nearly fourteen hours are just enough time to stay one step ahead of its customers.
“I was looking at places around the world where I could tap into because my philosophy always was if a customer could send us a questionnaire by 5:00 p.m. and it was back in their inbox at 6:00 or 7 a.m. in the morning, that would be like magic,” SecurityPal CEO Pukar Hamal told Business Insider.
The company — which launched in San Francisco in 2020 —opened a 24/7 security operations command center in Kathmandu two years ago this month.
It now employs almost 200 workers in Kathmandu. They’re largely in their 20s and 30s and have a broad range of expertise, from those who studied technical subjects like cybersecurity and computer science to those with a liberal arts focus in economics or psychology.
SecurityPal has won many of the biggest — and buzziest — clients in the tech industry. It has become a key player behind some of the AI industry’s top names, handling security questionnaires for companies like OpenAI, Langchain, and Cursor. Its main focus is making the security review process easier for enterprise companies.
When these companies take on a new customer they are typically vetted by that customer through a security questionnaire. This complex document covers everything from how the company handles data to how it identifies vulnerabilities in its systems to the physical measures it takes to protect its facilities.
In its early days, SecurityPal’s employees manually filled out every questionnaire. “What we learned quickly was that there were ways to automate the steps,” Hamal said.
Now, when a company signs up, SecurityPal’s analysts first spend time understanding the company’s full security and compliance posture. They’ll parse, annotate, and add context to historical questionnaires, infrastructure documents, compliance reports, and other relevant information to create “discrete” question and answer pairs, Hamal said. Using AI, the company has built a repository of over 2 million pairs, which can be used for various customer requests.
As rapid advancements in AI drive companies to adopt new tools, Hamal said he’d noticed more “paranoia” in the questionnaires SecurityPal’s clients receive.
“I think companies just have a really hard time digesting what’s actually happening with their data,” he said. “The questions are different. They’re more nuanced.” When it comes to large language model providers, for example, “they want to know how the model is used, how the model’s trained, where it is hosted,” he added.
SecurityPal serves 200 to 300 customers annually. Most employ 500 to 1000 people or more, and one-fifth of its customer base is publicly traded companies. At its Series A funding round in 2022, it was valued at $105 million. Hamal did not disclose the company’s current valuation but said it’s north of that now.
From Silicon Valley to Silicon Peaks
Hamal, now 33, left Kathmandu for New York when he was 7. He studied international relations at Stanford and planned to become a diplomat. He ultimately ended up in the tech industry, launching his first startup, Teamable, in 2016. It was acquired in 2020.
With SecurityPal, Hamal didn’t initially have plans to launch a second base in his motherland. He was looking at places that were hours ahead of the US — like India and the Philippines — so when it was nighttime for his clients, his team could be hard at work.
“I just was always skeptical about the talent here,” he said. Once he realized how many students Nepal was sending to the US, UK, and Australia, though, he began to reconsider.
From 2000 to 2016, the number of Nepali students enrolled in degree programs abroad surged by 835%, reaching 44,255 students by 2017, according to a report from World Education News and Reviews. Nepal’s ratio of international students to domestic students is also significantly higher than neighboring countries like India.
When COVID-19 hit, though, many students who went abroad returned to be closer to family and stayed. They were not only fluent in English, but also equipped with technical skills that rivaled those of workers in Silicon Valley, Hamal said. He saw potential in this pool of talent.
“I’m trying to champion the term ‘Silicon Peaks’ because there’s a lot of technology talent just nestled amongst the foothills,” he said.
Economic growth in Nepal has steadily increased since 2018, when a new government was formed after years of political turmoil and peace negotiations. Between 2023 and 2024, the services sector — including industries like tourism, real estate, and trade — was the greatest driver of Nepal’s gross domestic product, according to data from World Bank. Agriculture also plays a significant role in the economy.
Through the base in Kathmandu, Hamal is hoping to reshape how the world views Nepal’s workforce.
“Nepal’s always been sort of like this feeder country of high-quality physical labor,” he said. He mentioned the Gurkhas, Nepali soldiers that the British East India Company began recruiting in the early nineteenth century as an elite fighting force or the scores of Nepali migrant workers who built stadiums in Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.
“The talent has always been there, but the perception was that it skewed more on the brawn side,” Hamal said. “Now, it’s the brain.”
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