SecurityPal Is Making an attempt to Carry Silicon Valley to Nepal

• SecurityPal helps main AI corporations full safety questionnaires.
• The corporate has been working a 24/7 command heart in Kathmandu, Nepal since 2023.
• “There’s numerous expertise expertise simply nestled amongst the foothills,” CEO Pukar Hamal mentioned.

At 10:00 p.m. in San Francisco, it is 11:45 the subsequent morning in Kathmandu, Nepal. And for AI safety startup, SecurityPal, these almost fourteen hours are simply sufficient time to remain one step forward of its clients.

“I used to be locations around the globe the place I might faucet into as a result of my philosophy at all times was if a buyer might ship us a questionnaire by 5:00 p.m. and it was again of their inbox at 6:00 or 7 a.m. within the morning, that may be like magic,” SecurityPal CEO Pukar Hamal informed Enterprise Insider.

The corporate — which launched in San Francisco in 2020 —opened a 24/7 safety operations command heart in Kathmandu two years in the past this month.

It now employs nearly 200 employees in Kathmandu. They’re largely of their 20s and 30s and have a broad vary of experience, from those that studied technical topics like cybersecurity and laptop science to these with a liberal arts focus in economics or psychology.

SecurityPal has gained most of the greatest — and buzziest — shoppers within the tech trade. It has grow to be a key participant behind among the AI trade’s high names, dealing with safety questionnaires for corporations like OpenAI, Langchain, and Cursor. Its principal focus is making the safety evaluation course of simpler for enterprise corporations.

When these corporations tackle a brand new buyer they’re sometimes vetted by that buyer by way of a safety questionnaire. This complicated doc covers every thing from how the corporate handles knowledge to the way it identifies vulnerabilities in its methods to the bodily measures it takes to guard its services.

In its early days, SecurityPal’s staff manually stuffed out each questionnaire. “What we discovered rapidly was that there have been methods to automate the steps,” Hamal mentioned.

Now, when an organization indicators up, SecurityPal’s analysts first spend time understanding the corporate’s full safety and compliance posture. They will parse, annotate, and add context to historic questionnaires, infrastructure paperwork, compliance studies, and different related info to create “discrete” query and reply pairs, Hamal mentioned. Utilizing AI, the corporate has constructed a repository of over 2 million pairs, which can be utilized for numerous buyer requests.

As fast developments in AI drive corporations to undertake new instruments, Hamal mentioned he’d seen extra “paranoia” within the questionnaires SecurityPal’s shoppers obtain.

“I feel corporations simply have a extremely exhausting time digesting what’s really taking place with their knowledge,” he mentioned. “The questions are totally different. They’re extra nuanced.” In the case of massive language mannequin suppliers, for instance, “they wish to understand how the mannequin is used, how the mannequin’s skilled, the place it’s hosted,” he added.

SecurityPal serves 200 to 300 clients yearly. Most make use of 500 to 1000 folks or extra, and one-fifth of its buyer base is publicly traded corporations. At its Collection A funding spherical in 2022, it was valued at $105 million. Hamal didn’t disclose the corporate’s present valuation however mentioned it is north of that now.

From Silicon Valley to Silicon Peaks

Hamal, now 33, left Kathmandu for New York when he was 7. He studied worldwide relations at Stanford and deliberate to grow to be a diplomat. He in the end ended up within the tech trade, launching his first startup, Teamable, in 2016. It was acquired in 2020.

With SecurityPal, Hamal did not initially have plans to launch a second base in his motherland. He was locations that had been hours forward of the US — like India and the Philippines — so when it was nighttime for his shoppers, his crew might be exhausting at work.

“I simply was at all times skeptical in regards to the expertise right here,” he mentioned. As soon as he realized what number of college students Nepal was sending to the US, UK, and Australia, although, he started to rethink.

From 2000 to 2016, the variety of Nepali college students enrolled in diploma packages overseas surged by 835%, reaching 44,255 college students by 2017, based on a report from World Training Information and Critiques. Nepal’s ratio of worldwide college students to home college students can also be considerably increased than neighboring international locations like India.

When COVID-19 hit, although, many college students who went overseas returned to be nearer to household and stayed. They weren’t solely fluent in English, but in addition geared up with technical expertise that rivaled these of employees in Silicon Valley, Hamal mentioned. He noticed potential on this pool of expertise.

“I am attempting to champion the time period ‘Silicon Peaks’ as a result of there’s numerous expertise expertise simply nestled amongst the foothills,” he mentioned.

Financial development in Nepal has steadily elevated since 2018, when a brand new authorities was fashioned after years of political turmoil and peace negotiations. Between 2023 and 2024, the companies sector — together with industries like tourism, actual property, and commerce — was the best driver of Nepal’s gross home product, based on knowledge from World Financial institution. Agriculture additionally performs a major function within the economic system.

Via the bottom in Kathmandu, Hamal is hoping to reshape how the world views Nepal’s workforce.

“Nepal’s at all times been form of like this feeder nation of high-quality bodily labor,” he mentioned. He talked about the Gurkhas, Nepali troopers that the British East India Firm started recruiting within the early nineteenth century as an elite preventing power or the scores of Nepali migrant employees who constructed stadiums in Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup.

“The expertise has at all times been there, however the notion was that it skewed extra on the brawn aspect,” Hamal mentioned. “Now, it is the mind.”