SecurityPal helps leading AI companies complete security surveys. The company has been operating a 24/7 command center in Kathmandu, Nepal since 2023.
It’s 10pm in San Francisco and 11:45am in Kathmandu, Nepal. And for AI Security Startup and SecurityPal, nearly 14 hours is enough time to stay one step ahead of customers.
“My philosophy was to see if customers could send surveys by 5pm, and I was back in my inbox at 6am or 7am, so I was looking at places all over the world. SecurityPal CEO Pukar Hamal told Business Insider.
The company, launched in San Francisco in 2020, opened its 24/7 Security Operations Command Center in Kathmandu two years ago this month.
It currently employs around 200 workers in Kathmandu. They are primarily in their 20s and 30s, and have a wide range of expertise, from those who have studied technical subjects such as cybersecurity and computer science to those with liberal arts focusing on economics and psychology. have.
SecurityPal has attracted many of the biggest and most talked about clients in the tech industry. Became a key player behind some of the top names in the AI industry, processing security surveys from companies such as Openai, Langchain, Cursor and more. Its main focus is to facilitate the security review process for enterprise companies.
When these companies assume a new customer, they are usually reviewed by that customer through a security survey. This complex document covers everything from how businesses process data, how they identify vulnerabilities in their systems to the physical measures they need to protect their facilities.
In the early days, SecurityPal employees manually filled out all surveys. “What we learned quickly was that there are ways to automate the procedures,” Hamal said.
Now, once a company signs up, SecurityPal analysts spend their first time understanding the company’s full security and compliance attitude. Hamal said that to create “individual” question and answer pairs, they parse, annotate, and add contexts to historical surveys, infrastructure documents, compliance reports and other related information. Using AI, the company has built more than 2 million pairs of repositories. This can be used for a variety of customer requests.
As rapid advances in AI promote the adoption of new tools, Hamal said in a survey received by clients at SecurityPal, he noticed more “paranoia” in “paranoia.”
“I think companies are really struggling to digest what’s actually happening with their data,” he said. “The questions are different. They are more subtle.” For example, when it comes to large language model providers, “I want to know how to use the model, train the model, and where the host is,” he added.
SecurityPal serves 200-300 customers each year. Most people employ between 500 and 1,000 or more people, with one-fifth of their customer base being public companies. It was valued at $105 million in the 2022 Series A funding round. Hamal had not disclosed the company’s current valuation, but said it is now north.
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From Silicon Valley to Silicon Peak
Pukar Hamal, 33-year-old CEO of SecurityPal, was born in Nepal. SecurityPal
Hamal, now 33, left Kathmandu at the age of seven for New York. He studied international relations at Stanford University and planned to become a diplomat. He ended up finishing in the tech industry and launched his first startup, Teamable, in 2016. It was acquired in 2020.
In the case of SecurityPal, Hamal initially had no plans to launch 2 bases in his homeland. He saw places that were just hours away in the US, like India and the Philippines, so when it was night for his clients, his team could work hard.
“I’ve always been skeptical of talent here,” he said. Once he realized how many students Nepal was sending to the US, UK and Australia, he began to rethink.
From 2000 to 2016, the number of Nepal students enrolled in overseas degree programs increased by 835%, reaching 44,255 students by 2017, according to a report on World Education News and Reviews. The proportion of domestic students to international students in Nepal is significantly higher than in neighbouring countries like India.
However, when Covid-19 hit, many students who went abroad came close to their families and stayed there. Not only were they fluent in English, they also had technical skills comparable to the skills of Silicon Valley workers, Hamal said. He saw the possibilities in this pool of talent.
“I’m trying to defend the term ‘Silicon Peak’. Because there’s a lot of tech talent that’s just within the hills,” he said.
Nepal’s economic growth has been steadily increasing since 2018, when the new government was formed after years of political turmoil and peace negotiations. From 2023 to 2024, the services sector, including industries such as tourism, real estate and trade, was the biggest factor in Nepal’s gross domestic product, according to World Bank data. Agriculture also plays an important role in the economy.
Through the Kathmandu base, Hamal hopes to reconstruct how the world sees Nepal’s workforce.
“Nepal has always been like this feeder country of this high quality physical labor,” he said. He is a Nepali soldier who began recruiting in the early 19th century as an elite fighting force or as a score for Nepali migrant workers who built a stadium in Qatar for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. I mentioned it.
“Talent has always been there, but that was the perception that it was more distorted on the Bloan side,” Hamal said. “Now, it’s the brain.”
