6 Fintech Startups to Watch in Nepal This Year

Nepal now has over 150 active tech startups and the country's fintech sector alone counts more than 140 companies, with total ecosystem funding topping $300 million in 2025 — a tenfold jump from 2020. This isn't just Kathmandu anymore. Founders in Chitwan, Biratnagar, and Pokhara are building products for micro-entrepreneurs banks have ignored for decades. This year's six fintech startups worth watching aren't chasing Silicon Valley playbooks — they're solving problems that are distinctly Nepali.

1. Khatapana — Accounting for the People Banks Forgot

Founded in 2018 by Kailash Panday, Khatapana (by Finnove Technologies) set out to solve a problem hiding in plain sight: Nepal's 1.5 million micro-entrepreneurs — the kirana stores, vegetable vendors, and tiffin sellers — were running their finances in notebooks and mental arithmetic because every accounting app assumed English literacy, tech comfort, and a willingness to pay monthly subscriptions. Khatapana assumed none of those things. The app is built in Nepali, uses intuitive visual interfaces, and offers a generous free tier that's brought in over 200,000 downloads and 50,000+ daily active businesses.

What makes it a standout watch for 2026 is what comes next: Panday has announced Khatapana is expanding into small business lending, using its own transaction data to underwrite credit for customers that traditional banks routinely deny. A bootstrapped startup — never having taken external funding — with a $30M+ estimated valuation now entering the lending space is precisely the kind of story that defines Nepal's current fintech moment. The thesis is simple: if you already know how a business is performing day by day, you don't need a collateral certificate to decide whether to lend.

2. Aloi — Making Formal Credit Accessible for Informal Businesses

Aloi was founded in 2019 by Sonika Manandhar and Tiffany Tong — two women who identified that the single biggest barrier to micro-enterprise growth in Nepal wasn't ambition or market demand, it was the inability to access formal financing. Informal sector businesses, including women-led micro-enterprises that make up a huge share of Nepal's productive economy, routinely fail to meet the documentation, collateral, and credit history requirements that banks demand. Aloi built its platform specifically to bridge that trust gap.

The company received co-financing and technical support from ESCAP (UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific) and the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF) under a programme catalyzing women's entrepreneurship, backed by Global Affairs Canada. That international institutional backing was a turning point: it funded Aloi's first technology prototype and its initial loan portfolio. Since then, the startup has been rapidly expanding its network of banking partners throughout Nepal, pursuing the mission of helping small and micro business owners access the formal financial system that was previously designed to exclude them.

Watch this one for its banking partnership expansion and whether it begins issuing its own credit products at scale — the micro-lending runway in Nepal is enormous.

3. CellPay — Cross-Border Payments Meets BNPL

CellPay has quietly built one of the more globally connected payment platforms in Nepal — a meaningful achievement in a market where cross-border financial infrastructure has historically been fragmented and slow. The company has established partnerships with MoneyGram to expand bill payment options for consumers in the US sending money to Nepal, and separately partnered with Klarna, the global leader in Buy Now, Pay Later, to bring BNPL-style flexible payment options to Nepal — a first for the region and a signal that Nepal's payments market is being watched by sophisticated international players.

Nepal's remittance sector is massive — remittances account for a significant share of the country's GDP, making cross-border payment infrastructure genuinely critical rather than a niche play. CellPay's position at the intersection of inbound remittances, bill payment, and emerging BNPL models gives it a distinctive lane in Nepal's fintech ecosystem that neither pure wallet players nor traditional banks currently occupy.

The one to watch here: whether the Klarna BNPL integration gains consumer traction among Nepal's growing middle class, and how CellPay responds to the opening of UPI-based cross-border payment as India and Nepal continue digital payment cooperation.

4. Karobar — Bridging Informal Businesses Into the Digital Economy

Karobar is a digital accounting and business management platform built for the realities of Nepali small and medium businesses — covering accounting, inventory management, invoicing, expense tracking, sales reporting, and business analytics in a single product. It's positioned as a financial operating system for the Nepali SME that has grown beyond a notebook but isn't ready for — or able to afford — enterprise accounting software built for a different market entirely.

What makes Karobar notable in the current fintech landscape is the underlying data play: a platform that captures daily business operations across thousands of SMEs is building a financial data asset that could eventually power credit scoring, insurance underwriting, or embedded lending — all services desperately underserved for Nepal's small business community. Karobar is listed among Nepal's top fintech startups on Tracxn alongside household names like Khalti and eSewa, a sign that the market is recognizing the infrastructure value of business accounting in an economy making the formal-to-informal transition.

5. InfoDevelopers — The Invisible Engine Behind Nepal's Banking Apps

Most people have never heard of InfoDevelopers — but if you've used a mobile banking app at a Nepali bank in the last decade, you've almost certainly used their technology. Founded over 22 years ago, InfoDevelopers has built a portfolio that spans core banking systems, mobile banking applications, portfolio management software, and digital governance tools, serving over 1,500 clients including major financial institutions across Nepal.

Their flagship product, mDabali Next Gen, is an advanced mobile banking platform that integrates online and offline payment services into a single interface — a meaningful feature in a country where connectivity is still inconsistent outside major cities. What's brought InfoDevelopers into the "startups to watch" conversation in 2026 is their accelerating investment in AI and machine learning capabilities, including blockchain integration — positioning them not just as the company that powered the last decade of digital banking in Nepal, but as the infrastructure layer that will power the next wave of AI-enabled financial services.

As Nepal's banks compete harder on digital experience, the company providing the backend for most of those experiences becomes increasingly strategically critical.

6. Khalti — Nepal's Digital Wallet Growing Beyond Payments

Khalti, launched in 2017 by Janaki Technologies, has grown into one of Nepal's two dominant digital wallets alongside eSewa, now processing over $1 billion in transactions annually. What started as a mobile wallet for utility bill payments and top-ups has evolved into a comprehensive financial platform covering merchant payments, peer-to-peer transfers, government payments, QR code transactions, and more — and serving users not just in Kathmandu but in underserved communities where digital finance is genuinely expanding financial inclusion rather than just replacing an existing card payment.

Khalti's position in 2026 is worth watching for a different reason than most of the other startups on this list: PhonePe, India's largest digital payment platform, has partnered with eSewa and others to promote UPI cross-border payments in Nepal — a development that could reshape the competitive landscape for all wallet players. How Khalti responds to the potential arrival of UPI-interoperable payments, and whether it leans into financial products (savings, insurance, credit) beyond payments, will define its next chapter.

Common Threads Across These Startups

Looking across all six, three themes keep surfacing — and they're the same themes reshaping fintech across Southeast Asia and South Asia right now:

• SME lending via transaction data: Khatapana and Aloi are both approaching credit from a non-traditional angle, using behavioral and transactional data rather than formal documentation to assess creditworthiness — a necessary innovation in an economy where most small businesses lack the paperwork that traditional underwriting requires.
• Cross-border infrastructure: CellPay's international partnerships and the emerging UPI integration signal that Nepal's fintech ecosystem is increasingly being built for a world where remittances, cross-border commerce, and multi-currency transactions are everyday realities, not edge cases.
• Formalization tools: Karobar and Khatapana are both, at their core, tools that pull informal economic activity into a digital, documented, and eventually financeable format — a critical step in Nepal's journey toward broader formal financial inclusion.

Funding & Support Landscape

Nepal's fintech funding environment is still maturing. Of the 142 fintech startups currently tracked in Nepal, only 12 are externally funded — and just one has reached Series A+ stage. Most meaningful startups, including Khatapana, are fully bootstrapped. The institutional support that does exist comes primarily from international development organizations: the UN (ESCAP, UNCDF), the EU, and bilateral aid programs from Canada and the UK have provided early-stage co-financing to startups like Aloi.

At the government level, Nepal launched a Startup Loan Programme offering Rs 25 lakh collateral-free loans at 3% interest for seven years to early-stage ventures in priority sectors, alongside a five-year income tax exemption for qualifying startups. The World Bank committed $95 million to expand SME finance access, expected to reach 100,000+ small businesses. And Nepal's 2026 graduation from Least Developed Country status is expected to bring updated investment policies and more competitive incentives for private capital into the startup ecosystem.

What to Watch For Next

• UPI cross-border integration: The PhonePe-eSewa partnership signals a major potential shift for all Nepali wallet players — watch how Khalti and CellPay respond.
• SME credit products at scale: Khatapana's move into lending is the test case for whether transaction-data-based credit scoring can work at meaningful scale in Nepal's SME market.
• First significant venture funding round: With the ecosystem maturing and bootstrapped startups hitting growth ceilings, 2026-27 could see Nepal's first major Series A fintech round from a domestic or regional VC.
• Nepal Rastra Bank regulation: The Central Bank's evolving digital payments and fintech licensing framework will shape which business models can legally operate at scale — keep an eye on any new licensing categories or digital banking regulations.
• Regional expansion: Nepal's fintech players — particularly in remittances, mobile banking infrastructure, and cross-border payments — have a clear geographic edge serving labor-migration corridors to the Gulf, Malaysia, and South Korea.