When Izada Marat moved from New York to California with her husband and KODIF co-founder and CEO Chingiz Zumazarov in 2018, she had to sort out her immigration status. That’s when everything started to go wrong.
A Kyrgyz-born, Harvard-educated lawyer, she came to the United States as an exchange student at age 17 through the State Department-sponsored Future Leaders Exchange (FLEX).
After going to Harvard, Marat moved to London after graduation due to immigration issues. Now she has come to California with Zumazarov, who is now enrolled at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and has been offered a job at Cooley, a leading law firm.
But she didn’t realize that immigration attorneys can be very buyer-beware. She Googled a lawyer in Palo Alto to help her with her visa. It turned out to be a bad move. Marat said the lawyer gave her incorrect advice about when she could apply for permission to work in California. That mistake left her unable to work for more than a year. She also couldn’t leave the country.
“I’m a lawyer, so I listen to lawyers,” Marat told TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, it was devastating to hear them say that, because a few months later, I still wasn’t working. I got a job offer from Cooley.”
Marat ended up working for Cooley for three years, and she returned to the immigration law firm to show her the mistakes. It also sparked her entrepreneurial spirit.
After leaving Cooley and working as a management consultant at McKinsey, Marat kept coming back to that horrible immigration experience. She began to wonder why immigration legal services were of such poor quality, given the lengthy and complex immigration process.
She found that immigration law was “highly fragmented,” meaning that one firm owned 10% of the market, while the remaining 90% was shared among more than 20,000 firms.
“There are very few large law firms that do immigration services today, because they primarily serve individuals, and the checks are small,” Marat said. “That’s why most people can self-petition for a talent visa. They don’t need an employer. In my case, Cooley didn’t sponsor my visa, so I had to do it myself.”
And when she thought about what to do about it, Marat started her own company to develop software to sell to immigration lawyers. The goal was to help them provide better service and prevent what happened to Marat from happening again.
After four or five months of selling software to five immigration law firms, Marat and her team decided to do immigration research. In October 2023, they launched Alma, an AI-based legal tech startup she started with other immigrants, including former Uber engineering manager Shuo Chen and former Step project manager Assel Tuleubayeva.
The startup aims to streamline the visa process for technologists, entrepreneurs and researchers by providing personal legal advice, accelerating document processing and digitizing the entire process. And like other companies working in this space, including Migrun, Boundless and Lawfully, Alma is looking to rapidly attract international talent to the U.S. tech ecosystem, Marat said.
Marat says Alma differs from some of its competitors by offering more services, including hiring its own immigration attorneys.
“Immigrants deserve high-quality service because so much depends on the immigration attorney you find,” Marat said. “We can automate all the repetitive, routine work that attorneys hate, so that attorneys can really focus on each client and provide a really good strategy to get higher approval rates.”
Alma recently raised a combined $5.1 million in seed and pre-seed funding to help the company grow. The company is supported by Bling Capital, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, Conviction, MVP, NEA, and Silkroad Innovation Hub. The majority of the funds will be used to hire new employees for product and technology development.
