Pukar C. Hamal

Founder & CEO SecurityPal

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Pukar C. Hamal is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of SecurityPal, a company he started in 2020 to solve a problem that is both mundane and commercially enormous: the security questionnaire. Before a large enterprise buys software, it sends the vendor a document containing hundreds or thousands of questions about their security posture, and until those are answered the deal does not close. The work is tedious, highly specialized, and almost always falls on the engineers and security staff least able to spare the time. SecurityPal combines AI agents with a team of more than 150 certified analysts, based substantially in Kathmandu, to answer them at speed. Its customers include OpenAI, Figma, MongoDB, and Airtable.

Career Highlights

• Founded SecurityPal in 2020 and leads it as CEO.
• Built a customer base including OpenAI, Figma, MongoDB, and Airtable, with nearly two million security questions answered.
• Created a substantial skilled-technology employment base in Kathmandu, Nepal.
• Reported as the first Nepali-American featured on the front page of Forbes.com.
• Member of the Forbes Business Council and a contributing author at Dark Reading.
• Studied international relations at Stanford University, after conducting biochemistry research at Columbia while still in high school.

Professional Journey

Hamal was born in Kathmandu, with family roots in Darchula in far-western Nepal, and moved with his family to New York City at the age of seven. He conducted biochemistry research at Columbia University while still in high school, then went on to Stanford University, where he took a degree in international relations rather than a technical subject.

His early career reflected that orientation toward institutions and policy rather than engineering. He worked as a government, regulatory affairs and public policy analyst at PwC, and as a program analyst at the Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen Foundation, the philanthropy-focused organization associated with Stanford. He also invested in and advised technology startups at seed stage, which is where he encountered the problem that became his company.

The security questionnaire is a structural tax on enterprise software sales. A vendor cannot close a large deal without satisfying the buyer’s security review, and that review arrives as an unstandardized document of hundreds of questions requiring precise, defensible answers about encryption, access control, incident response, and compliance. For a growing software company the volume becomes unmanageable, and the work pulls exactly the wrong people — security engineers — away from securing anything.

Hamal founded SecurityPal in 2020 to take the work off them entirely, combining automation with human expertise rather than betting on either alone. AI agents handle retrieval and drafting against a company’s existing documentation, while certified analysts verify, adapt, and stand behind the answers, which matters because a wrong answer in a security questionnaire is a contractual representation rather than merely an error.

The company’s structure is as notable as its product. Rather than staffing analysts in an established outsourcing market, Hamal built the operation in Kathmandu, creating skilled cybersecurity employment in Nepal and, in the process, making SecurityPal a prominent example of Nepal’s emergence as a destination for technology work rather than a source of emigrating talent. Forbes covered the company in January 2025 for its role in helping Figma and OpenAI close large sales, and Hamal is reported to be the first Nepali-American featured on the front page of Forbes.com.

Education

Stanford University

Bachelor’s degree, International Relations