Photo: Unshackled Ventures
Unshackled Ventures is a Palo Alto-based venture firm that has a mission of creating 100,000 new American jobs by investing in immigrants and sponsoring this visas. Unshackled recently announced it raised $20 million for its sophomore fund, which is up from its $15.5 million debut fund.
“The point is to take the burden off of founders because they are not immigration experts, they are experts at building satellites or extracting protein from plants,” said Unshackled founding partner Nitin Pachisia in an interview with TechCrunch. “These are people that if you go to a workspace, you’ll see them show up on nights and weekends because they want to build something but they can’t.”
One of the biggest reasons why Unshackled Ventures is focusing on helping immigrants is because they face major barriers. For example, Jyoti Bansal waited seven years before launching AppDynamics — which got acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion before the startup went public. Bansal had to wait seven years due to his H-1B visa status, meaning he could work for startups but could not legally launch his own startup. Then Bansal founded AppDynamics after he received an employment authorization document (EAD) — which is a step towards receiving a green card.
Zoom founder Eric S. Yuan also famously got rejected for a visa eight times. Yuan eventually emigrated from China in 1997 at the age of 27 and he spoke in broken English. Then Yuan spent ten years building WebEx as the VP of Engineering and later built the video conference giant Zoom and took it public.
According to the National Foundation for American Policy, immigrant founders are responsible for 55% of U.S. billion dollar companies. Some of the major U.S. companies founded by immigrants include Kraft, Zumba, Capital One, eBay, Pfizer, Intel, Kohl’s, Google, AT&T, and Tesla.
“The difference between success and failures is oftentimes who you know and when,” added Unshackled founding partner Manan Mehta via TechCrunch. “We can bring those resources at just 1/200th the size of Andreessen Horowitz to immigrants at day zero.” Mehta also said that they are creating the best place for immigrants to start their companies and they are “keeping American innovation in America.”
Mehta (son of immigrants) and Pachisia (Indian immigrant) founded Unshackled in 2015. And they have invested in 31 companies at the pre-seed stage. And Unshackled is the lead investor in 90% of its portfolio companies. Plus they have achieved a 100% success rate in procuring visas in order to help keep talent in the U.S. Some of the companies in their portfolio include Career Karma, Starsky Robotics, Plutoshift, Togg, Hype, and Lily AI. Some of those startups have went on to raise $54 million in follow-on investments from top-tier investors like Y Combinator, First Round Capital, NEA, Shasta, Data Collective, Village Global, RRE, Rise of the Rest, Gradient Ventures (Google), Sequoia and Accel.
In a statement, Pachisia also said that he knows the barriers that foreign-born entrepreneurs face firsthand. Pachisia pointed out that he founded Unshackled while on a visa to show people like him that it is possible to achieve the American dream “even in these circumstances.” Pachisia is the first recipient of nearly 100 successful visa filings.
“I didn’t think it was possible to start a company on a visa in the U.S., let alone scale one to hit the next major milestone so quickly,” explained Plutoshift founder Prateek Joshi. “After receiving a Master’s from USC, I wanted to create a product to help solve the $40 billion water problem but felt confined to getting a job at a tech company to secure a visa. That all changed when we met the Unshackled team. From handling the time- and cost-intensive visa filing process to providing the capital and network we need to succeed, Unshackled is the best place for immigrant founders to start a company.”
Unshackled’s investors look for aspiring immigrant founders far and wide. Plus they respond to every cold email received. The venture firm also joined the Rise of the Rest tour — which is a tour that was set up by The Case Foundation chairman Steve Case and Rise of the Rest Fund managing partner JD Vance. Unshackled also participates in VetCon (event for veteran entrepreneurs) and the Comeback Tour (brings Silicon Valley investors into the heartlands of America)
Unshackled’s LPs for this round include Bloomberg Beta, AME Cloud Ventures (venture fund led by Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang), and Emerson Collective.
