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The Startup Trying to Rebuild Immigration Like Software
Some of the most important companies built in America over the last forty years were started by people who were not born there.
Andy Grove arrived as a refugee fleeing the Hungarian Revolution. Jan Koum came from a village outside Kyiv with his mother after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Patrick Collison and John Collison left a small village in Ireland and crossed the Atlantic chasing ambition.
This is not a coincidence repeated a few times across decades. It is a structural feature of the American innovation economy. Immigrants have founded more than half of America’s unicorn startups, and an even larger percentage of those companies rely on immigrants in leadership, engineering, and product roles.
Which makes the current immigration system strangely self-defeating.
At the exact moment when global talent has become one of the most important competitive advantages a country can possess, the United States has made it extraordinarily difficult for ambitious people to enter and build there. The country still attracts founders, engineers, scientists, and researchers from around the world. But increasingly, it feels as though they are succeeding despite the system rather than because of it.
And that gap between America’s dependence on immigrant talent and the experience immigrants actually go through has quietly created a very large business opportunity.
If you are a founder trying to hire globally, or an immigrant founder trying to build a company in the United States, the process quickly becomes exhausting in ways that have little to do with actual talent or merit.
The problem is not that visa pathways do not exist. Technically, they do. O-1 visas for individuals with extraordinary ability. EB-1 pathways. National Interest Waivers. On paper, there are routes available.
In practice, however, the process feels like entering a maze designed by institutions that assume your time has no value.
Most founders encounter the same pattern almost immediately. You reach out to immigration law firms and wait days or weeks for responses. The firms that eventually reply often provide vague timelines and no certainty around total costs. The elite firms charge hourly rates that resemble top-tier investment bankers. Smaller firms are cheaper but difficult to vet. Communication is inconsistent. Updates are sparse. The process drags on for months while founders and candidates sit in limbo.
And because startups already operate under intense operational pressure, many eventually decide the friction simply is not worth it. Instead of accessing global talent, they narrow hiring to people already inside the United States.
That decision sounds operational. But at scale, it becomes economic.
A country that depends on immigrant talent has accidentally built a system that discourages companies from hiring immigrants at all.
The Part Most Legal Tech Companies Got Wrong
Over the past decade, legal technology has attracted billions of dollars in venture capital. AI tools have flooded into the industry promising efficiency gains, automation, and productivity improvements.
But most of these startups approached the market from the wrong angle.
They built software for law firms.
At first glance, that sounds logical. Law firms are the incumbents. They already own the clients and workflows. Selling tools into existing infrastructure feels easier than rebuilding the infrastructure itself.
The problem is that software alone does not fix incentives.
If the traditional law firm model already benefits from opacity, hourly billing, administrative complexity, and client dependence, then AI often ends up reinforcing the same structure rather than changing it. The law firms become more efficient internally, but the customer experience barely improves.
That is the insight behind Manifest OS. Instead of building software for law firms, they decided to build the law firm itself. That distinction may sound subtle, but strategically it changes everything.
The Founder Who Experienced the Problem Himself
Like many enduring businesses, Manifest began with personal frustration.
Founder Dan Mishin went through the immigration system himself and experienced firsthand how broken the process felt. Not merely bureaucratic, but structurally misaligned with the needs of ambitious people trying to move quickly.
The realization was not simply that immigration law was inefficient. Plenty of industries are inefficient. The deeper realization was that almost nobody inside the system had incentives to fix the customer experience.
Traditional law firms were profitable already. Their economics improved when cases became more complex, more uncertain, and more time-consuming. Clients carried the stress while firms billed the hours.
Manifest approached the problem differently.
The company now operates through two connected entities: Manifest OS, which builds the software and operational layer, and Manifest Law, which handles the legal practice itself.
Instead of asking lawyers to manage everything from client intake to billing to operations, Manifest centralized those functions into the platform. Lawyers focus only on practicing law. The software handles the surrounding machinery.
To clients, the difference feels dramatic almost immediately.
Rather than unpredictable hourly billing, clients receive flat-fee pricing tied to outcomes. Instead of endless email chains asking for updates, there is a centralized dashboard showing exactly where the case stands. Communication becomes faster, timelines clearer, and the process far less emotionally exhausting. In some situations, the company even offers partial or full refunds if applications fail.
What makes Manifest interesting is not that it uses AI. Plenty of companies use AI now.
What makes it interesting is that it redesigned the operating model around the client instead of around the law firm.
Why Immigration Was the Perfect Starting Point
At first glance, immigration law might seem like a niche category to build a large company around. In reality, it is almost the perfect wedge.
Immigration combines high emotional urgency with enormous operational inefficiency. The people navigating it are often ambitious, globally mobile, and deeply motivated to solve the problem quickly. At the same time, the process itself remains fragmented, opaque, and difficult to navigate without expensive legal help.
That combination creates unusually strong demand for a better experience.
More importantly, immigration gives Manifest access to exactly the kinds of people who tend to create outsized economic value later: founders, engineers, researchers, executives, and startup operators.
Every successful case compounds the network.
The company has already worked with thousands of individual clients and more than 150 corporate immigration programs, including startups like Whop and Orchard Robotics. Their visa approval rates reportedly exceed national averages for key categories like O-1 and EB-1 visas.
The engine is already working.
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The Real Business Is Much Larger Than Immigration
It would be easy to mistake Manifest for an immigration startup. That is probably the least interesting way to look at it.
The larger ambition is to build an AI-native legal infrastructure company spanning multiple practice areas globally. Immigration is simply where the company began because the founding team understood the pain deeply and because the market was unusually broken.
But once you abstract the model, the expansion path becomes obvious.
Most legal categories suffer from the same structural problems: expensive access, fragmented service providers, slow communication, unclear pricing, and administrative inefficiency. Whether the issue is corporate law, employment law, tax, intellectual property, or real estate, the underlying customer experience often feels remarkably similar.
Manifest is effectively betting that many legal services are not fundamentally legal problems at all. They are workflow and operations problems disguised as legal work.
That distinction matters because workflow problems scale differently.
The more cases Manifest processes, the better its systems become. Every client interaction creates operational data. Every inefficiency becomes visible. Every improvement compounds across future cases.
This is one reason investors like Menlo Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round Capital participated in the company’s recent $60 million funding round.
They are not simply investing in immigration law. They are investing in the possibility that legal services, one of the oldest and most tradition-bound industries in the world, may finally be entering its software era.
The Strategic Advantage Most Competitors Do Not Have
One of the most overlooked parts of Manifest’s model is that they operate the service directly instead of merely selling tools into the ecosystem.
That creates a powerful feedback loop.
Most legal AI startups build products for law firms but never actually see how those products are used day to day. They remain one step removed from the operational reality.
Manifest sits inside the process itself.
Every case sharpens the software. Every workflow adjustment improves future throughput. Every operational bottleneck becomes training data for the system.
As Dan Mishin put it, “Most legal AI companies are selling shovels; Manifest OS is mining.”
That may end up becoming the company’s defining advantage.
Because once a company owns both the operational layer and the customer relationship, it can improve faster than competitors who only touch one piece of the system.
What This Says About the Future of Professional Services
For decades, law looked structurally immune to disruption.
The industry relied on reputation, regulation, specialization, and institutional inertia. Clients accepted slow communication, hourly billing, and complexity because there were few alternatives.
But many industries once believed they were insulated from software until suddenly they were not.
Media thought distribution protected it. Finance believed regulation protected it. Education believed institutions protected it.
Law may be discovering the same thing now. Not that lawyers disappear, but that the delivery model changes completely.
Once customers experience faster communication, transparent pricing, standardized workflows, and software-assisted service, it becomes difficult to justify going back to the older model.
That shift may happen slowly at first. Then very quickly.
Closing Thought
The most interesting companies are often built by founders who stop accepting friction as inevitable. Dan Mishin experienced America’s immigration system firsthand and asked a question most industries eventually face:
What if this entire thing were redesigned from scratch?
That question may end up producing something far larger than an immigration startup.
Because once you realize that many professional services industries are essentially workflow systems wrapped in tradition, you start seeing opportunities everywhere.
And law, despite centuries of institutional permanence, may turn out to be one of the largest industries still waiting to be rebuilt.
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Disclaimer: The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in the text belong solely to the author, and not necessarily to the author's employer, organization, committee or other group or individual.