When Aizada Marat moved to California from New York with her husband, KODIF co-founder and CEO Chingiz Jumanazarov, in 2018, she needed to sort out her immigration status. That's when things started to go wrong.
A Kyrgyz-born, Harvard-educated lawyer, she came to the United States at age 17 for a one-year exchange program through the U.S. State Department-sponsored Future Leaders Exchange Program (FLEX).
After graduating from Harvard University, Marat moved to London due to immigration issues, and then came to California with Jumanazarov, who had enrolled in Stanford Business School, to take a job offer from the major law firm Cooley.
But she didn't realize immigration lawyers were being so cautious with buyers. She found a lawyer in Palo Alto through a Google search who could help her get a visa. But that turned out to be a bad choice. Mallat said the lawyer gave her incorrect advice about when she could apply for work authorization in California. The mistake prevented her from working for more than a year. It also prevented her from leaving the country.
“I'm a lawyer, so I listen to what lawyers say,” Mallat told TechCrunch. “Unfortunately, listening to what they said was devastating because months later, I still didn't have a job. I had been offered a job by Cooley.”
Mallat ended up working for Cooley for three years, then she returned to the immigration law firm to show them the wrong they'd done her, which also sparked her entrepreneurial spirit.
Even after she left Cooley to work as a management consultant at McKinsey, Mallat kept remembering her terrible immigration experience. She began to wonder why immigration legal services were so poorly provided, given the lengthy and complicated immigration process.
Alma's digital immigration application management. Image courtesy of Alma
She learned that immigration law is “highly fragmented,” with 10% of the market captured by one law firm and the remaining 90% shared among more than 20,000 law firms.
“There are very few big law firms offering immigration services right now because they mostly deal with individuals and it's small checks,” Mallat says. “So to get a talent visa, in most cases you can apply for it yourself. You don't even need an employer. In my case, my coolie wouldn't sponsor my visa so I had to arrange it myself.”
So Mallat wondered what to do next and decided to start a company that would develop software to sell to immigration lawyers to help them provide better services to prevent what happened to Mallat from happening again.
After selling the software to five immigration law firms for four or five months, Marat and her team decided to pursue immigration research. In October 2023, they launched Alma, an AI-powered legal tech startup that she co-founded with other immigrants, including former Uber engineering manager Shuo Chen and former Step project manager Asel Tureubayeva.
The startup aims to simplify the visa process for technologists, founders and researchers by providing personal legal counsel, helping speed up paperwork and organizing the entire process digitally. And like other companies operating in the space, such as Migrun, Boundless and LawFree, Alma wants to quickly bring international talent into the American tech ecosystem, Mallat said.
Mallatt said Alma differentiates itself from competitors by offering more services, such as hiring its own immigration lawyers.
“Immigrants have a right to quality service, because it really depends on which immigration lawyer they find,” Mallat says. “All of the repetitive, mundane tasks that lawyers hate can be automated so they can really focus on every client and provide them with really good strategies to increase their approval rates.”
Supporting the company's progress is Alma's recent seed and pre-seed funding of $5.1 million. The company is backed by Bling Capital, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, Conviction, MVP, NEA and Silkroad Innovation Hub. A significant portion of the funding will be used to support new hires for product and technology development.