This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
When college students Ugyen Dendup and Jamphel Yigzin Samdrup launched their startup last year, they had yet to learn that they would spend most of their time servicing some of the most prestigious institutions in Bhutan.
Dendup and Samdrup are the founders of NoMindBhutan, the country’s first artificial intelligence startup that makes and deploys chatbots. The company’s eight clients include the Bhutan National Bank, the country’s flag carrier Drukair – Royal Bhutan Airlines, the Bhutan National Digital Identity programme, the National Land Commission, and the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Employment.
In a country that has only 15 homegrown tech startups, according to data from startup analytics firm Tracxn, this is a feat – and one that is paving the way for others. But given Bhutan’s closed physical and digital economy, NoMindBhutan’s journey is not easy. Startup and tech industry experts believe that for Bhutan to truly benefit from AI, the entire ecosystem needs to evolve.
“When we started, we [didn’t] really [have] a big dream … We just wanted to bring in AI tools suitable for all the Bhutanese context,” Dendup, 23, told Rest of World. “We have brought lots of big companies and big government institutions to our side. All of them are paying customers for us … We have a dream to have our own server, run our own [natural language processing] … but for now it’s beyond our capacity.”
When they set up NoMindBhutan, Dendup and Samdrup were freshmen in the AI Development and Data Science programme at the Gyalpozhing College of Information Technology. The programme, introduced in 2021 after a royal decree called for educational reform, offered an industry-focused curriculum. The college brought in over a dozen teachers from Singapore, who were experts in AI and data science, to provide guidance to aspiring entrepreneurs.
NoMindBhutan started out developing customer-facing AI chatbots for clients. These were similar to ChatGPT, but instead of pulling data from all of the internet, NoMindBhutan focused on specific information that the client offered via their website and other resources.
In the early days, Dendup and Samdrup wrote proposals to the bigger institutions in the country – including Bhutan National Bank, Royal Insurance Corporation of Bhutan, and Bank of Bhutan – to sell their AI chatbots.
In August 2023, Bhutan National Bank signed on as the company’s first client. The bank’s vote of confidence “significantly elevated our visibility and credibility in the market,” Dendup said. After that, their college encouraged them to submit more proposals and helped them find three more clients.
NoMindBhutan is “very highly motivated so they are keen to learn … to make quick changes,” Pallavi Sharma, NDI’s marketing and communications lead, told Rest of World. NDI started working with NoMindBhutan last November, and locked in an annual contract at 5,000 ngultrum ($60) per month. Current monthly charges for companies looking to use NoMindBhutan’s chatbot services start at 8,000 ngultrum ($96).
NoMindBhutan’s seven-member team of college students works out of their dormitory. They use a makeshift workstation created by pushing four wooden tables together. When the college is closed during vacations, they rent a small space to work. Each member is required to work nine hours a day, as per the employment agreement reviewed by Rest of World.
“We have five to six hours of classes per day … and we give three to four hours for assignments and class projects for our members,” Dendup said. “We have to endure sleepless nights and sacrifice our leisure time due to the high work pressure. If we decline projects, they hesitate to offer us future opportunities. Therefore, we continue accepting projects to ensure ongoing collaboration in the future.”
As of June, NoMindBhutan had 150,000 ngultrum ($1,799) in the bank, and was waiting on another 201,000 ngultrum ($2,410) in pending payments from clients. The bootstrapped team does not draw salaries right now, and all the revenue goes back into the company for expenses like business travel, team dinners, and infrastructure, Dendup said. Earlier this month, he bought seven new monitors for the team.
Dendup credits his college for playing a major role in NoMindBhutan’s success so far.
“The college itself has been kind of rebranded … so that students get the right education for the right industry,” he said. The international faculty not only comes with “lots of tech experience,” but also helps out in areas like marketing and finance. “We are very new to all these things,” Dendup said.
Pema Wangmo, who heads the AI Development and Data Science programme at Gyalpozhing, told Rest of World the college’s swift switch to focus on AI and data science had placed pressure on the faculty and students. “[But] we had to take this step,” she said.
About 90% of Gyalpozhing’s graduates are employed, according to Wangmo. The college incubates student startups and helps them connect with clients. “We don’t support them financially, but we assist them through guidance and mentoring,” Jigme Tshewang, a lecturer at Gyalpozhing, told Rest of World. “We provide them with the space for their work.”
More student-led startups from Gyalpozhing college are following NoMindBhutan’s roadmap.
On June 3 and 4, Rest of World attended the college’s third two-day project showcase, where 394 students presented 77 startup ideas. These included the use of AI in water current management, driving assistance, fashion advice, and sign language translation.
But the college, part of the Royal University of Bhutan, might be placing too much emphasis on student-led AI innovation, Phub Dorji, AI advocate and CEO of digital media startup Nyingnor, told Rest of World.
Bhutan should focus on investing in cloud computing infrastructure or enhancing AI literacy for existing businesses instead of “teaching kids how to make apps,” said Dorji. “There are immediate benefits in earning revenue by helping Bhutanese companies utilise AI tools. However, if taken too seriously and if government funds are heavily invested in this area, it could potentially result in a waste of resources.”
The lack of “maturity” and “global exposure” could hold such student-led startups back from scaling internationally, NDI’s Sharma warned.
“For [the] outside world to trust the product that comes out of Bhutan … it has to be very distinctive and have value propositions that other organisations in the world are not able to meet,” she said.
Even if sophisticated AI startup ideas exist, scaling innovation in the small Himalayan country would be difficult due to physical and digital constraints. Bhutan’s only data centre, according to government records, is “quite a small one, only maybe about 2,000 square feet,” Tshering Cigay Dorji, who ran the Thimphu Tech Park – Bhutan’s first IT development – for around 10 years, told Rest of World. For context, the world’s largest data centre, located in China, is 10.7 million square feet.
In addition to its inadequate physical infrastructure, Bhutan’s digital ecosystem is closed off, making it harder to introduce even existing AI products to the wider public – an issue NoMindBhutan is also grappling with.
“One of the main challenges we face is the inability to access international payment platforms such as Stripe and PayPal. Additionally, we do not have access to cloud servers like AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud to host our AI models, which is crucial for reducing costs and improving the quality of our AI,” said Dendup. Many of these services are not available in Bhutan, “making it impossible for us to even open an account,” he said. “We remain committed to advancing AI in Bhutan and overcoming the barriers that stand in our way.”
Despite challenges, NoMindBhutan is already planning bigger projects. In June, the company launched Sherig.ai, a personalised AI tutor that lets students tailor curriculums with video lessons and quizzes based on Bhutanese textbooks. The company is also developing a new version of its chatbot, which is expected to give clients full access to train and manage it
Lhakpa Quendren is a journalist based in Thimphu, Bhutan.
Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia's tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
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