Seattle startup Casium, which makes use of synthetic intelligence to streamline the work visa utility course of, raised $5 million in seed funding.
The spherical was led by San Francisco-based Maverick Ventures, with participation from Seattle’s AI2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Enterprise Companions, and Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, now a part of Thomson Reuters.
Casium, spun out of AI2 Incubator in April 2024, is led by founder and CEO Priyanka Kulkarni, a former Microsoft scientist and entrepreneur-in-residence at AI2 Incubator who needed to repair an issue that she herself skilled whereas making use of for an EB-1 visa.
“Casium began from frustration, from my very own expertise with a course of that was complicated, opaque, and stuffed with limitless backwards and forwards,” Kulkarni wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “What started as a private ache level turned a mission to construct one thing higher. Right now, that mission has grown into an answer serving to international expertise and the businesses that rent them transfer ahead quicker with transparency and expert-led precision at each step.”
Making use of for work visas requires candidates and employers to make their case to the U.S. authorities for why the person is deserving of the chance, citing schooling, work expertise and different components.
The method and paperwork may be time-consuming even with the assistance of an outdoor legislation agency, and Kulkarni’s purpose was to shrink the timeline from months all the way down to days.
The Casium platform makes use of algorithms to first assess the very best route for an applicant, which might be a short lived work visa or searching for everlasting residency. The startup makes use of AI to autonomously collect info for an utility and put together the doc. Casium works with immigration attorneys to information the method and signify the visa candidates.
Casium provides preliminary assessments without cost and expenses a flat payment for filings primarily based on visa sort and case complexity, Business Insider reported. Kulkarni mentioned the corporate can be creating a subscription mannequin to present employers extra choices for ongoing assist.
The startup, which employs 9 individuals, says it’s already working with employers from early stage startups to Sequence F firms and has assisted tons of of candidates by means of visa assessments, compliance opinions, and precise filings, and maintains what it calls “an exceptionally excessive approval fee.”
“Each submitting and each approval is a reminder of why this work issues,” Kulkarni mentioned in calling out Casium’s clients on LinkedIn.
The highlight on work visas ratcheted up last month when President Donald Trump introduced an executive order outlining a $100,000 payment for H-1B visas, which permit firms to rent extremely expert overseas staff in “specialty occupations” akin to software program engineering, knowledge science, and different STEM fields.
Casium mentioned greater than 442,000 staff compete for simply 85,000 H-1B visa slots yearly. The high-stakes course of underscores the corporate’s potential enchantment.
Different firms are working to enhance the authorized immigration expertise — together with fellow Seattle startup Boundless Immigration, which spun out of Pioneer Sq. Labs in 2017 and helps immigrants join with legal professionals and file functions for spousal visas and U.S. citizenship. Boundless has raised greater than $43 million and is likely one of the largest consumer-focused household immigration firms.
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