Manan Mehta, founding partner of Unshackled, explains how the fund was created to solve the visa‑related obstacles that immigrant entrepreneurs face when trying to build U.S. startups. He begins with a personal anecdote about a co‑founder on an H‑1B who could not quit his job without losing sponsorship, illustrating the broader problem: immigration policy and the lack of a startup visa limit the ability of highly skilled foreign nationals to launch companies, even though immigrants have founded a large share of Fortune‑500 and Silicon Valley firms. Mehta argues that venture capital can provide a faster, more direct remedy than policy change. Unshackled’s model hires immigrant founders as employees, sponsors their work visas, and provides up to $160 K in capital via a convertible note (caps $3‑5 M, equity 5‑10.5%). The fund takes a 5 % “entry fee” equity stake, while founders retain full control over the remaining capital. The program supports multiple visa categories (H‑1B, cap‑exempt H‑1B through university partnerships, TN, E‑3, OPT, O‑1, etc.) and has forged partnerships with the University of Massachusetts and the University of California system to leverage cap‑exempt hiring. Applications are run in batches (e.g., closed Oct 23, next open Jan 4), with a highly selective process. The fund is backed by 80 prominent investors (e.g., Jerry Yang, Naval Ravikant, Steve Case, Laurene Powell Jobs) and includes an immigration attorney who receives equity instead of fees. Mehta reports nine current portfolio companies and plans to scale to support dozens or hundreds of immigrant‑led startups, positioning Unshackled as a pre‑seed investor that aligns a “do‑good, do‑well” mission with the economic benefits of immigrant entrepreneurship.
Chapters
My personal background, I was born and raised here. So I view myself as American as the next person who was born here. But when I started a company called Fanery, I started it with a foreign national on H-1B visa. Anyone on that visa here? Or most of you guys are on B-1, B-2s? Any OPT F-1s? Huh? Okay. No, used to. Used to be. OK. Yeah, I started a company with a guy that was on a work authorization called H-1B, which I'm sure you're all familiar with. But the challenge that he was facing was he couldn't quit his full-time job. He was the first engineering hire at a startup. But when he wanted to build his own company, he couldn't quit. Because if he quit his job, he would lose his sponsorship. You lose your sponsorship. you can't be in this country. And so for our startup to sponsor him, we had to raise at least half a million dollars, which is very hard when your co-founder and technical co-founder is on a visa and not full-time. Long story short, as an American, I recognize this is not just an immigrant problem, this is an American problem. Fundamentally, there's no surprise that almost 50% of Fortune 500 companies have been founded by immigrants. It's no surprise that about 45% of Silicon Valley companies are founded by immigrants, but that number keeps on going down due to our wonderful policymakers in Washington, D.C. So what we looked at was how do we solve this problem from the venture side? You can try to change policy, but as many of you may know from your home countries or from being here, that's a long, long process. It requires a lot of money and a lot of influence, and it's oftentimes not done in a matter of days or weeks. It takes years, if not decades. So what we looked at was, can the venture industry as a whole provide that opportunity for the brightest minds the country attracts, foreign nationals that have left the comforts of their home to build something great? I would argue that every one of you have shown at least more entrepreneurial passion than about 99% of U.S. citizens in the country today. Because you've all had, or a majority of you have had to leave your home country, come to a new place, and figure it all out for your first time. Whether you're building a scalable tech business or you're building your personal endeavor, you've all shown an entrepreneurial drive. And I believe it's incumbent upon this country to support you. And so what Unshackled created is this new funding structure that allows us to enable you to stay here and connect you with a network, what we call is the unfair advantage. So instead of typical investors who write you a check, let's say for $150,000, $200,000, where that money is not enough to sponsor a visa— there is no startup visa, I wish there was, but there is none— We instead allocate those dollars in our bank account and hire you. We sponsor your visa. You become employees of Unshackled. We invest up to $160,000, which the only requirement we have for founders is that they meet the minimum wage requirements set forth by our labor laws. That's it. So every other dollar beyond that, the founders have full autonomy on. They can spend it the way they want. We don't have any oversight on it. And the way we structured it was by us being able to hire you, we can sponsor visas. Now here comes the questions, right? I'm on a B-1/B-2, how do I secure a work authorization visa? To this day, I mentioned 6 continents of founders. We've also now secured 5 different visa types. We've done H-1B, TN, E-3 for Australians, an OPT, and an O-1. We just announced a partnership 2 weeks ago with the University of Massachusetts, which has this beautiful thing called a cap-exempt H-1B, which fundamentally lets us help everybody else. B-1/B-2s can now come in and secure these visas through the university. We provide the funding, universities hire you, universities can hire as many H-1Bs whenever they want. Wow. It's a nice little loophole that was carved out for them because they are federally funded and they do a lot of research work. They didn't want to be limited by the 85,000 H-1Bs granted every year. So 1 in 3 chance to win it now. So we announced a partnership with the University of Massachusetts. We're working on something pretty major with the University of California school system. That's 10 campuses and working with Carnegie Mellon and University of Chicago on scaling this across the country. What this allows us to do is effectively help every single type of foreign entrepreneur that wants to be here or has shown the desire to get here. Now, it's a highly selective process, right? We don't help everybody. We're not a not-for-profit. We are taking equity in companies. We take 5% to come into the fund. And the $160K goes into a convertible note between $3 and $5 million caps. So we're taking anywhere from 5% to 10.5%, depending on what stage and how much revenue or no revenue you have. What this allows us to also do is separate the value that we're creating from the capital. So the capital can come from anywhere. That $160K, it can be your friends and family. It can be Tim Draper. Tim Draper. It can be any VC, any angel. That money can be put in the side fund of Unshackled and we deploy it. Whatever terms you negotiate with them are great by us. All we charge is 5% because we provide the visa support, the network, and all the resources you need to hopefully be a successful entrepreneur. This has all been kind of an ongoing year. We've done a lot of different types of structures, but we're actually pretty excited. About a month ago, we announced the formal new structure, which is going quite well. We just announced also an application batch system. So now we just closed our applications on October 23rd. The next one will open up on January 4th, which allows us to now evaluate the hundreds of applications that we get and decide on who we want to support. But again, That decision is about where our capital goes, right? So 5% plus $160,000. If you have your own capital, it's a different decision process for us, right? We don't have to be as, call it, diligent on should we help or not. At the end of the day, the capital can come from anywhere, which allows us to help not just 30 companies, but maybe 300 companies. And it's really— Like I said, it's kind of taken form over the last year. We have, like I said, founders from Kenya, Slovakia, Puerto Rico, India, a lot of those. Got a few from Australia and the UK. So we've gotten a pretty good diverse mix. Our office is in Palo Alto. All the teams work out of our space. The stage at which we enable these founders, is probably relatively close to where most of you guys are today, maybe a little bit further along, but we look at ourselves as a first investor in. We call ourselves pre-seed, and we're here really to give 60% of you or those that have co-founders that are immigrants that opportunity to keep on dreaming and keep on building. If— Woo! It's fun, right, because we have kind of a do good, do well mission. The fund is supported by 80 investors, 8-0. Many of the names are probably going to be household names to most of you. People like Jerry Yang, Naval Ravikant from AngelList, Joe Lonsdale, Palantir and Formation8, Steve Case, Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs' widowed wife, First Round Capital, Bloomberg, a lot of great people got behind us. I think that was because of the people in this room, not because of us. They knew what this looked like, and they wanted there to be a model which brings the best forward and then lets the country reinvest in what was the strongest asset class the country's ever gotten, which is immigrants. So with that, I'll take a few questions. Quick pause. I know there's probably a lot of questions. Happy to answer just about everything. I haven't had a question yet that I haven't been able to answer or won't answer. I will say there is now officially 9 teams in our fund. We may be bringing anywhere from 9 to 1 more in this next batch. Their final evaluation's coming up next Tuesday. And there's 9 teams coming in, so we can do all 9 or we can do zero. It really doesn't matter to us. We want to invest in the best. And so a number of those came in— applications came in from Canada, a couple from India, a couple from Europe on B-1/B-2s. And so we have to explore the cap-exempt O-1, E-2. Our third partner is an immigration attorney, very important. And instead of his legal fees, he's got part of our equity. So he's not getting paid? So he's very motivated to make sure that you guys all get to stay here. And he also represents Stanford StartX and a few other Silicon Valley companies. Thank you.
