Destin AI - Supporting Immigrants

Let's move over to Destin AI. Nargis, are you there? I see your face but not video. So, oh, there you go.

Hello, everybody.

So we're moving from the world of insurance to the world of immigration and law, which is a very hot topic, especially with our president in the United States making Canada all that more amazing a place to go. And by the way, for those of you who have not spent time in Canada, I've been twice this year. It is amazing. I love it. Every time I go, I'm like, whoa, it's less crowded, more civilized. And your business is helping people get to Canada much more easily. So why don't we turn it over to you? Destin AI, bringing AI to legal and immigration issues. I will mute and go offline.

Hello everybody, my name is Nargis. I'm the founder and CEO of Destin AI. Together with our diverse team, we are creating AI-powered platform for immigration. So you're probably thinking that in an ideal world you would like to move from one country to another without any hassle thinking about visa issues. But in reality, it is not like that. So we have a client from US. He's actually from Iran. He wants to come to Canada, and he's a young professional. He reached out to us and mentioning that he searched about immigration system in Canada. He doesn't know what's going on. He's simply confused, overwhelmed, and he doesn't know where to start. And guess what? Ahmad is not alone. There are actually 45 million people in the world who wish to come to Canada for various reasons. And according to the Minister of Immigration of Canada, he mentioned that in next 3 years Canada will admit 1 million immigrants, and immigrants will make population growth of 65% by the year. Created a simple platform for people to find the right information— how to come to Canada, how to check their eligibility, simply how to find a lawyer— because in a realistic world, it's too much hassle. So our platform, what it does is through our natural language processing, we answer the people's question and we connect them with the right lawyer. And without no hassle, they can check their status and get their visa very smoothly. So the benefit we have is we save time for people that they can save their nerves to themselves and we provide them transparent choice. And simply we are making this process smooth for both lawyers and the applicants. Since we launched, it's a very speedy growth. We doubled our team members. And since we started from Founders Institute, later we joined Legal Innovation Zone in Canada, and later NEXT AI program admitted us as well. And we are growing in 25%, and we are currently helping our people manually with the support of 20 subscribed lawyers. And our business model is very simple. We simply do not charge the applicants. We charge the lawyers for the transaction fees, fixed fees depending on the visa program. And our platform is so smooth that now the lawyers want this platform to manage their own clients. That's why we will subscribe them monthly for using our platform as well. And we are also working on the solution where people can prepare their own application with the fraction of the cost. This market is huge. Only in Canada, if you calculate, last year Canada admitted 320,000 immigrants and average spent $10,000. Just in Canada, this market is $3.2 billion. And our plan is, after successfully implementing this in Canada, we want to move to different markets, which the global potential is $141 billion. And our go-to-market strategy is designed in a way that we know where the immigrants are searching for, for information about about how to come to Canada. We will utilize content marketing, digital media, and we are already started doing our events in different parts of the world. We are diverse team of immigrants. We want to create a solution first for ourselves and the people like us. And in our team, we do have the people who have legal background, operations, technology, media, and especially artificial intelligence. And in terms of the funding, we are looking for our 18-month runway, $500,000 seed round, and we want to aim to support 300,000 immigrants with the support of 300 immigration lawyers. That's it about us, and we are Destin AI. We are innovating the immigration field through artificial intelligence. Thank you so much. I'm looking forward to your questions.

Boom! Well done, well done. All right, I gotta ask the first question. Sorry about that. So, you know, has immigration spiked in your opinion to Canada, given all this stuff that's happening in the US? And do you have any empirical evidence to back that statement up?

Obviously, we know what's happening in the US. For me to start this business happened for my own immigration journey. When I moved to Canada, I faced difficulties to find the right information. Even I had the good experience, good English, still I suffered. Then I figured out that it's not only me, people just have hard time to understand this immigration system. But obviously, yeah, the external environment in the US is working for our benefits.

Right, you may eventually do it in the US as well. Quickly, Mark, a question. We got lots of questions coming in the chat as well. Mark, do you want to—

Yeah, I guess, okay, well, you're going to force me to one. I want to know, like, how do you acquire these users? I'm assuming, like, Canada immigrates from, you know, hundreds of countries globally. What's the plan there? Is it just through web portals? And then my second question, which I'm going to sneak on, is like, what's the plan for global expansion? Because this is something that could be scalable across different countries. So I'd be interested to hear both.

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So because we have in our team the people from diverse countries, we know exactly where those immigrants are searching for information and we are utilizing these channels. Regarding the global expansion, the technology we are using is exactly the same. Doesn't matter where you are. As soon as you figure out the legal system, we have a target Australia, United Kingdom, Schengen European zone, and obviously US. Dubai and Singapore. So as soon as we figure out the legal system in those specific areas, we can actually help people to move from one A destination to B.

Wow, I'm just going to give you an A+ on brief and informative question answering. Well done. Everyone take note, that might have been the best answer to a kind of complex question I've heard in a long time. Let's turn it over to some of the people who are in the chat. So Niaz is writing— hopefully I pronounced your name right— I'm collecting and needing documents, but I do not know exactly how much I should pay for a lawyer. So I'm— that's a question, so I'm presuming you help with that, figuring out the amounts, collecting, etc.

Basically, in our platform, everything is very transparent. By selecting the lawyer before booking the lawyer, they know the consultation fee and the service fee, so they can compare the prices themselves.

Okay, how will people know about the service and offering? You already answered that. Are you going to work with immigration certified professionals too? Now, I don't know what that is, but I presume you do. So that's from Roger.

Basically, in Canada, there are 3 layers: immigration lawyers, paralegals, and immigration consultants. We are starting from immigration lawyers to keep the quality high. Later, we will also open it for immigration consultants and paralegals as well.

Eventually. Eventually, right? Will— so this— Rich is asking, will the applicant incur the lawyer fees? I'm presuming they will, but then You know, I want to sort of just understand, you talked about this a little bit. You know, do they pay through you? Or do they pay the lawyer directly? Is there the ability to circumvent? So I'm taking Risha's question. Will the applicant incur the lawyer fees and add that payment process question on top of it?

And there are two streams. First stream is if the person does their own application, then there's no lawyer involved, they directly pay us. In the case of the lawyer connection, we still get the payment from the people and pay the lawyer later on. The reason behind is it takes 10 to 15 days for the lawyer to receive the money from the applicant, but in our case, it just happens in a second and we transfer the money to the lawyer speedy too. So it's an additional service for lawyers to fasten the payment process. That's why we take the fund and we transfer it.

Right, so you're saying your payment system is much faster. Is that where you get your commission from then?

I wouldn't call it a commission because referral fee is illegal in Canada. It's a fixed technology fee where we actually provide support to lawyers.

Good point. Wow, you got a lot of questions here. Holy crow, my eyes are gonna get tired. All right, so there's a lot of people wanting to immigrate to Canada. Not shocking. Maybe that's the answer I asked earlier. How's your system will show "Real-time visa status to clients. Has CIS exposed visa application statuses to public or other applications?" That's a million-dollar question.

We are already started working with— like, we are in negotiations with Government of Canada. If we reach to an agreement that they can give access to the system, we can make it happen. But for now, we want to make sure that we do what we can and until the door of government. Later on, if we reach to an agreement, we can make it happen. Just watch what we are doing.

Jeremiah is asking, you know, obviously you support probably French and English. What about the languages of the people that are coming in from Iran or wherever else?

Basically, yes, exactly. So basically we are operating in English now. It's a matter of funding. If we get seed funding, we will translate whatever we have into the most spoken languages where the immigrants are coming from.

Is that— and now, sorry, Mark.

Sorry, I just wanted to ask, and how's the traction to date? I didn't see any—

We did zero marketing and events. We just offered—

Oh, wait, hold on. You cut out, you cut out. Whoa, freeze.

Right at the important part.

All right, try again. We didn't hear anything about—

basically, we are currently matching lawyers with applicants manually. We do have paying clients. I'm happy to share the exact details offline.

Okay, that— well, that was politically correct. Okay, what— let's keep going with the questions. What percentage of immigrants who need an immigration— what is a percentage of immigrants that need an immigration immigration lawyer? You know, not all 300,000 need a lawyer. There's self-service solutions, etc. So, and how do you deal with the scammer immigration lawyers? So those are two questions.

Basically, I will answer the question regarding scammers. So people will be able to report to us who are the scammers. We will have a blacklist. They can check and see who's a scam so that they don't need to deal with them. And to be able to get people to our platform, before we onboard them, we check they are real lawyers. We don't admit people instantly. We check if they're good with Canadian Law Society and they don't have any trouble. And I forgot the first question.

Oh, the first question is that, you know, not all 300,000 people here—

Yeah, I got it.

Yeah.

So basically we do have two streams. The people can prepare their own application, they don't need a lawyer, and some people need a lawyer. The reason they need a lawyer, because sometimes they got rejected once, if they apply again they are screwed. So, or they write a mistake, something. So obviously not everybody needs a lawyer. I cannot tell the percentage. For example, the younger generation wants to do it themselves. A little bit senior, they have more resources, they want to give it to the lawyer. And another reason why people use lawyer because they need confidence. Because imagine you want to move to a new country with your family members, you want to make sure that you are in good hands, even you're kind of not sure if you did everything properly or not. But eventually, yes, that's true. Not everybody needs a lawyer.

But I mean, in theory, you can help them do a lot of the work and reduce the legal costs with the AI.

Yes, right. That's what we are already doing.

Right. So, um, Edward was asking a somewhat similar question to the last one, which is How do you sort of— do you provide rating systems and reviews of lawyers? Are you— you know, that can be risky because you're like, this lawyer sucks, but use them. So, you know, how do you ensure the quality and rating and transparency of the work product of these different legal firms?

The beauty of the technology we have, you can see everything in an evidence, what's going on, what's the lawyer's response rate. What happened between each other. You can track the entire process, so everything is transparent. And there will be rating system, obviously, and we will see who's performing well, and the ones who don't perform, they will be out of the system.

Awesome. Um, wow, there's so many questions. What other markets, like students, are you considering expanding into in the future? Beside— so You know, you could look at geographic expansion, but you could also look at market expansion. This question is coming from Jerry.

So basically, as I mentioned earlier, depending on what makes sense from the financial point of view, at the same time what are the most need, we will put the targets for few countries and we will expand with the specific products. And obviously the international students is a big a big chunk in Canada, like so many people come to Canada to just study. So that exact market can be also implemented to different countries where the people mostly go to study as well.

One thing, interesting question from Roger, we try and get a couple more in, so answer quickly. You operate like an unofficial escrow service by holding the money and the lawyer knows before the work will be paid, will be done and paid. It's more like, so, comma, you operate like an unofficial escrow service, question mark. I guess commentary on that.

People use Google, people use Gmail, people use PayPal. And if the lawyer accepts the money through PayPal, does that mean PayPal is unauthorized? It's just another technology company that we are trying to support both lawyers and applicants. And everything that we do is in compliance with the rules in Canada.

So no, you're not an escrow service?

No, we are not.

Okay, just to make sure Roger gets his answer there. Wow, there's a lot of questions here. We got a few more minutes. Would you foresee partnerships with agents from different countries? Nayelo is asking. Hopefully I pronounced your name right.

We are considering these options. The issue with that is they are not regulated by Canadian legal organizations, it's hard to manage them. That's why we are considering it. I do not know, basically.

Okay, so you know, you're gonna focus on the legal, well-known channels first. Michael's asking, as a company desiring to hire immigrants, what advice would be useful? Is this a market you would pursue later on?

So the beauty is our platform is because we help people to come to Canada after, because they trust us We can help, like currently we are having partnership with different organizations like real estate, insurance, let's say somebody wants to study English, doesn't matter. After coming to Canada, we will have different channels for different purposes so that we can provide further guidance, and that will be also part of the plan.

Yeah. Okay, so We've been peppering you with questions. Mark, do you have any questions that you want to ask?

You know what, no, I think you've done a great job of warding us off. I think it's an amazing opportunity to acquire a customer to sell them future services, financial products, right? Like when you land in Toronto, you see all these ads for, hey, new to Canada, sign up for an RBC bank account. And if you could think about building out that affiliate network, you own the customer, right? That you have their trust, you engage with them on a digital platform. I think it's an incredible opportunity to set up some sort of marketplace of services, particularly focused on people who are new to Canada and they have assets, right? They need to set up their lives here. And I think also it's just somewhat of a great Canadian story of helping people move here and start their lives. So that's amazing. I'd love to connect afterwards. I don't know if you're in Toronto or Montreal, but that'd be great.

Yeah, no problem at all. I'm in Toronto, happy to chat.