The startup’s founder drew upon her personal immigration journey and time spent leading AI initiatives at Microsoft, focusing on features used by millions of users worldwide and on managing crucial international AI talent recruitment.
Casium, a company merging licensed legal expertise with cutting-edge technology to solve enterprise immigration and mobility challenges, announced a key milestone: a $5 million seed funding round to help employers access and retain top global talent at unprecedented speed and scale.
Maverick Ventures led the funding round, with participation from AI2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and angel investor Jake Heller, which will accelerate Casium’s efforts to make immigration a proactive workforce-planning tool rather than a compliance challenge.
A New Approach for Employers
American innovation is heavily reliant on global talent, yet employers face immense hurdles when looking at the related data:
- Talent Blockage: U.S. employers were recently blocked from hiring over 350,000 highly skilled professionals solely due to H-1B lottery restrictions.
- Widespread Shortage: Across all industries, 71 percent of employers report struggling to find qualified workers.
- AI Dependency: The challenge is most acute in high-demand fields like Artificial Intelligence, where over two-thirds of U.S. AI researchers were born abroad.
An increasingly stringent regulatory landscape is intensifying an already complex and . More than 442,000 workers now compete annually for just 85,000 H-1B visa slots. Furthermore, recent policy changes, such as new H-1B visa structures and the U.S. Department of Labor’s Project Firewall, signal heightened compliance enforcement.
Strategic immigration planning and airtight documentation is becoming essential for employers competing for global talent.
Outcome-as-a-Service: A Commitment to Certainty
CEO and founder Priyanka Kulkarni notes that relying on outdated or reactive processes is no longer sustainable. He reimagined business integration to change the status quo.
“Employers need absolute certainty in their immigration strategy,” Kulkarni states. “That’s exactly what our outcome-based approach delivers.”
Casium’s ‘Outcome-as-a-Service’ model replaces traditional transactional methods with a results-driven system. Clients pay for defined, measurable outcomes rather than processing alone.
Now the provider’s success aligns directly with the customer’s success, moving immigration from a cost center to a strategic competitive advantage.
The Power of Agentic AI and Expert Judgment
The Casium platform achieves consistent, high-quality immigration outcomes by fusing expert legal judgment with adaptive AI. It creates a single, connected system that unifies strategy, filing, and comprehensive compliance management, greatly benefiting employers.
This eliminates the need for fragmented providers and manual workflows.
Agentic workflows automate routine tasks and learn from real-time attorney feedback, increasing efficiency and improving outcomes with each case.
“Our clients don’t just get their visas approved, they get certainty, speed, and strategic guidance that turns immigration into a competitive advantage,” Kulkarni notes.
Founder-Market Fit and Early Success
Priyanka Kulkarni launched Casium in 2024, with support from the AI2 Incubator. Her vision for reimagining the immigration process is deeply rooted in her own experience.
After navigating a complex personal immigration journey, Kulkarni spent a decade leading AI initiatives at Microsoft, scaling features used by millions of users worldwide and managing crucial international talent recruitment for AI roles.
Her firsthand experience with system inefficiencies highlighted the need for a technical solution.
This blend of lived experience and deep technical expertise is what excites investors. Ryan Isono, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures, called Kulkarni the “perfect founder to reinvent the manual, text heavy processes of employment immigration and compliance with a truly AI-native platform.”
Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and Managing Director at AI2 Incubator, echoed this sentiment, noting, “Priyanka is exactly the kind of founder we back… she’s lived the problem, built deep technical expertise at scale, and has the vision to fundamentally reimagine a broken system.”
Casium serves clients from early-stage startups to Series F companies, guiding hundreds through complex filings. Some founders have moved from initial evaluation to employment in less than a month.
Surbhi Rathore, Vice President of AI Product and Strategy at Invoca, and former CEO of Symbl.ai, lauded the platform’s speed: “They moved incredibly fast and gave us transparency at every step. Casium had a complex visa filing ready within 10 days, which kept our acquisition on track. Their clarity and speed were unmatched, a true game-changer for hiring global talent.”
The new funding will support Casium’s growth, enabling employers to access and retain global talent more quickly and strengthening Casium’s role as a key resource for innovation-driven companies.
