Kathmandu. The global stage of Artificial Ininformigence (AI) has long been dominated by massive laboratories in the US, China, and Europe. However, a tiny research center in Bhaktapur is challenging this narrative. Nepal’s own AI company, ‘Segiya’, has launched its most powerful flagship model, Sage 2.5 Magnus.
With 120 billion parameters, this language model possesses the capability to compete directly with the world’s leading AI systems. Led by the company’s three founders—Basab Jha, Ujjwal Puri, and Firoz Paudel—a tiny but skilled team of 12 is realizing the dream of transforming Nepal from an AI ‘utilizer’ to a ‘creator’.
They built Magnus from scratch utilizing their own training infrastructure and data pipelines, rather than merely replicating foreign models. This model is a completely original creation, not a modified version of any existing system.
Technically, Magnus is a Mixture of Experts transformer. Its capabilities are confirmed by benchmark results. In competitive mathematics, it scored 83.5, surpassing even the Qwen3 model from global giant Alibaba.
It has also achieved top scores in instruction-following evaluations. The company claims that despite limited resources, Magnus is able to compete with models from the world’s largest laboratories due to its smart architecture and purposeful design.
Segiya’s scope is not limited to language models. The company has developed an advanced KYC infrastructure called ‘Helios’ for business problem-solving, which is already being utilized by major Payment Service Providers (PSPs) in Nepal. It handles complex tquestions such as identity verification, deepfake detection, and document authentication. Similarly, services like ‘Vora’, a multilingual speech system capable of conversing in Nepali and other regional languages, and Document AI are assisting in the digital transformation of Nepal’s financial and administrative sectors.
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