About
The founder
Born in Patan in 1942. Radio engineering in Calcutta (1962), computer engineering in England (1970), mainframes in France — then home, to build.
He assembled Nepal's first microcomputer in 1979 from parts gathered across three continents. In December 1983 his CP/M machine displayed the national anthem in Devanagari script — the first computer to read Nepali — earning a national Science Award. He founded High Tech Pioneer in 1984, opened Nepal's first computer-card factory in 1995, built a Nepali-speaking robot in 2005 and demonstrated the country's first supercomputer in May 2006.
Honoured by RONAST (2005), the CAN Federation ICT Business Excellence Award (2012) and the ICT Pioneer Award (2016). His work is documented by Wikipedia, The Record and CAN Federation.
Timeline
Muni Bahadur Sakya completes a diploma in radio engineering in Calcutta, India, and joins Radio Nepal as a technician on his return — repairing and running the country's broadcasting hardware.
Awarded a British Council scholarship, Sakya studies electronics and computer engineering in England. He is offered engineering work there — and turns it down to return home.
On French government training he works with mainframe computers, building microprocessor-based controllers and video cards — the exact skills that will soon be carried back to Kathmandu.
From parts gathered across three countries — a US keyboard, a Russian television for a monitor, a hand-built power supply and video card — Sakya assembles Nepal's first microcomputer. It is demonstrated at the South Asian Regional Conference on Computers in Kathmandu; The Rising Nepal and Xinhua cover the build. Parts sourced from around the world earn it a nickname: the "UN computer".
Sakya works at MTS Systems Corporation in the USA on floppy disk controller development — pushing toward 900 KB disks when 80 KB was standard — and visits Silicon Valley to see IBM's first hard-drive PC in production.
Returning home with sixteen boxes of components, Sakya demonstrates the first computer able to read and display Devanagari script on a CP/M machine — the national anthem, श्रीमान् गम्भीर, rendered in Nepali. A seven-day exhibition at Tri-Chandra College follows, Gorkhapatra prints the story, and he receives a national Science Award for the achievement.
Sakya establishes High Tech Pioneer Pvt. Ltd. in Dillibazar, Kathmandu — Nepal's first commercial computer hardware company, registered while the country was still the Kingdom of Nepal under the Panchayat system.
The Agriculture Development Bank commissions nineteen computers — one per branch — running Sakya's Devanagari system, entering customer names in Nepali. Government offices follow.
Sakya opens Sun Moon Computer Industry, the first Nepalese company to manufacture computer cards commercially — an early bid at hardware sovereignty against full import dependency.
A home-grown robot that speaks Nepali and senses obstacles through ultrasonic, infrared and mechanical whisker sensors — years before robotics was a topic in the domestic press.
The Royal Nepal Academy of Science and Technology felicitates Sakya as an A-class scientist in information technology for sustained contribution to Nepali science.
A sixteen-node cluster running open-source software (OpenMosix and OSCAR) is publicly demonstrated in Kathmandu — the country's first supercomputer, built from commodity machines for weather, financial and research computing.
The Computer Association of Nepal (CAN) Federation honours Muni Bahadur Sakya with its ICT Business Excellence Award for ushering information technology into Nepal.
Lifetime-contribution honour: the ICT Award committee recognises Sakya as the pioneer who "set a new precedent by demonstrating to everyone that it was possible for computers to be built in Nepal".
The lab enters its fifth decade building an InMoov humanoid robot and an AI wheeled robot on embedded edge-AI hardware — speech recognition, vision and language models engineered around Nepali users — carrying four decades of Devanagari computing into the age of machine learning.
Archive
People
Founder & CEO
Born 1942 in Patan. Built Nepal's first microcomputer (1979), taught computers to read Nepali (1983), founded the country's first commercial computer hardware company (1984) and its first computer-card manufacturer (1995), and demonstrated Nepal's first supercomputer (2006). Honoured by RONAST (2005), the CAN Federation (2012) and the ICT Pioneer Award (2016). Still at the bench, five decades on.
Software Lead — Robotics
Backend engineer specialising in Python, Django and FastAPI. Leads software for the HTP humanoid robot — Whisper speech recognition, vision-language scene understanding, face recognition and the master control pipeline on embedded hardware. By day he builds Nepal's national weather forecast and flood early-warning platforms at NAXA Pvt. Ltd.
Robotics & AI Researcher
Researcher in reinforcement learning and computer vision at NAAMII's A² Lab. Co-author of "Segment Anything but Farms" (WACV 2026 Workshop on Geospatial Computer Vision). At HTP he works on grounding vision-language models in physical robot action — teaching the machine to point at what it sees — alongside the 3D-printing pipeline and mechanical assembly.
Lab Assistant
Keeps the lab running day to day: 3D-print part finishing, servo wiring and calibration, sensor mounting and test support across the humanoid and wheeled robot builds.