Co-founder of Alma, Aizada Marat, founded a legal AI firm to improve these services after encountering serious difficulties with her immigration procedure. In order to address her immigration status, Marat moved to California in 2018 with her spouse, co-founder and CEO of KODIF, Chyngyz Dzhumanazarov. This was the first move that caused her problems.
Marat, who was born in Kyrgyzstan and attended Harvard, first entered the country at the age of 17 as a participant in the FLEX program, which was funded by the US State Department. Due to immigration concerns, she moved to London after graduating. Upon her return to the United States to assist Dzhumanazarov with her acceptance into Stanford Business School and her employment offer from Cooley, she came across unfavorable immigration guidance from a Palo Alto attorney discovered through an online search. Due to the lawyer's misguided advice, there were limitations on leaving the nation and an inability to work for a whole year.
Being a lawyer herself, Marat first followed the immigration lawyer's advise; nonetheless, this trust caused her to be unemployed for months even though Cooley had offered her a job. After three years of employment at Cooley, she addressed the immigration law firm about their error, which sparked her entrepreneurial spirit.
As a management consultant at McKinsey, Marat was always thinking back to her bad immigration experience. She noted that the immigration legal business in the United States is extremely fragmented, with over 20,000 firms sharing over 90% of the market, and just 10% being controlled by one company. Marat discovered that many individuals might self-petition for talent visa green cards without the necessity for an employer—something Cooley did not sponsor for her—after observing that large law firms hardly ever undertake immigration services due to the low financial returns.
In an effort to improve service quality and shield others from going through what she went through, Marat created a company to build software for immigration attorneys. She was determined to make a difference. After selling this software to five legal firms for several months, Marat and her colleagues made the decision to provide immigration services on their own. They co-founded Alma, an AI-powered legal tech business, in October 2023 with two other immigrants, Shuo Chen, a former Uber engineering manager, and Assel Tuleubayeva, a former Step product manager.
Alma's goal is to make the visa application process easier for academics, technologists, and startups by offering in-person legal advice, accelerating the processing of documents, and digitally managing the entire procedure. Alma shares the same goals as rivals Migrun, Boundless, and Lawfully: to quicken the assimilation of foreign talent into the US tech sector. Alma sets itself apart by hiring its own immigration lawyer and using proprietary technologies to provide top-notch services quickly.
In an interview with TechCrunch, Marat highlights the importance of choosing the right immigration lawyer, as this choice is essential to their success, and emphasizes that immigrants should have access to top-notch services." By automating tedious activities, Alma frees up attorneys' time to concentrate on their clients and create winning plans for increased approval rates.
$5.1 million in initial and pre-seed funding from investors such as Bling Capital, Forerunner, Village Global, NFX, Conviction, MVP, NEA, and Silkroad Innovation Hub is fueling Alma's expansion. The money is mostly going to be utilized to hire new personnel for technology and product development.
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