Abstract Emerging companies have special effort estimation requirements. They are under immense pressure to adopt immature technologies due to market and management pressure, which often led to different effort estimation problems. The abstracted data from different software organizations revealed that the most common effort estimation problems in emerging companies were related to inexperienced staff, lack of proper estimation culture and communication. A discussion of why these problems exists in the context of emerging companies in Nepal is provided; and although limited to certain areas, evidence based changes in four significant areas to improve estimation process in the emerging companies are given.