Hippo began to trade earlier this week after completing its SPAC combination. The home-focused U.S. neoinsurance provider initially stuck close to its $10 per-share pre-combination price before plummeting yesterday during regular trading.

But Hippo’s declines don’t appear to be of its own doing. Lemonade, another U.S. neoinsurance player — albeit one more focused on rental coverage — posted slightly better-than-expected Q2 results earlier in the week. After its report, Lemonade’s value dropped sharply, and it appears it dragged Hippo down with it.

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The trading volatility is interesting on its own, but what matters more is that the drop in the value of several neoinsurance companies is part of a larger trend. This week’s declines are not incredibly surprising — the market has negatively repriced tech-enabled insurance providers in recent quarters, which can be an uncomfortable situation for a category that previously basked in warm attention from public investors.

At this juncture, we’d typically riff on the new values of public neoinsurance companies and use that data to work our way into a guess concerning what the price declines might mean for related startups. Taking public-market data and using it to better understand private markets is pretty much the national pastime of this column.

Not today. Instead, we’re going to look into an interesting dynamic among neoinsurance companies that may matter a bit more for our comprehension of the private markets. Namely that the players in the space that we can name and track are generally cash-rich and market-sentiment poor.

Public markets are cutting the value of neoinsurance stocks, but the companies behind the valuation declines are rather wealthy. This makes their enterprise values smaller than you might guess from a quick glance at their market cap figures. But do Lemonade or Hippo really care if the stock market decides from one quarter to the next that their businesses are worth plus or minus 10%? Do they have enough cash to pursue their long-term visions, regardless?

Let’s unpack all the numbers, discuss an interview The Exchange held with Hippo CEO Assaf Wand earlier in the week and consider what Lemonade had to say during its earnings call.

As startups in Africa continue to grow and raise money at a ridiculous pace, so too will their cap tables expand. Most African startups’ bulk of VC money is from foreign investors, making it imperative for African startups to incorporate abroad, especially in the U.S.

The processes for incorporation are quite complicated, and even though most founders still get the hang of it, they risk the chance of messing up their cap tables. For instance, some Nigerian startups are guilty of issuing preferred shares in naira and then canceling to issue dollar-denominated SAFEs when they get incorporated in the U.S.

Raise, a startup building Africa’s Carta is tackling these challenges and has received backing from 500 Startups to scale its technology.

In 2019, Marvin Coleby, Tina Nyamache and Eugene Mutai set out to create a blockchain solution that would make it easier for people to buy and sell shares in pre-IPO companies in Africa. After running several iterations, they found out that most companies still struggled with the concept of equity and liquidity. They spent money managing corporate structures for holding companies in Delaware, Canada, and Europe but maintained paper-based subsidiaries across Africa.

According to Coleby, most of the equity across Africa is still stored, tracked and updated using paper certificates, manual processes and fragmented government databases. This raises transaction costs to manage subsidiaries and issue employee stock options. It also inflates costs to enter and exit positions in private and public companies.

So they started Raise to help startups, investors, employees, and law firms manage deals, cap tables and corporate compliance. 

On the platform, Raise customers can also automate due diligence, set valuations, track employee stock vesting and make routine documentation for licenses and government documents in Nigeria and Kenya. 

When Raise launched in 2019, it was in private beta and was backed by Binance Labs, the sole investor in its pre-seed round. Since proceeding to a public beta in 2020, Raise has onboarded customers like Anjarwalla & Khanna, Africa’s largest law firm; startups Bamboo, Workpay and Mono; and VC firms like Microtraction and Chrysalis Capital.

But the long-term problem Raise is trying to solve is liquidity, Coleby tells TechCrunch on a call.

“Everything we do is to find a way to make it easier for founders, customers, employees, investors to get liquidity from investing in companies,” he said. “Companies are raising money, people are investing, and employees are getting stock options. However, there are only one or two exits now and then. That’s because we build with the Silicon Valley model where we have to grow, scale until we get some big exit. From our perspective, liquidity doesn’t have to be that way. It can be small little pieces of liquidity that employees and investors get over time.”

By that measure, Africa’s capital markets for private and public companies are painfully illiquid. It takes several months or years to buy or sell equity, and, according to Raise, over $1 trillion of stock in Africa is “illiquid, paper-based and priced in inflationary currencies.”

Nigerian stock trading platforms like Chaka, Bamboo and Trove help Nigerians create liquidity for assets locally and internationally. However, Raise aims to build the platform behind them to streamline more asset classes and investment opportunities.

While that’s still in the works, Raise organizes ownership data for African companies and makes them accessible. It’s a similar play to what Carta, a $3 billion company offering cap table software, does for U.S. companies.

Over time, onboarding cap tables and equity data will also open up use cases for Carta to become a blockchain-based digital asset platform. The plan is to become more like Africa’s Nasdaq for private companies as it hopes to sell indexes, ETFs, futures, and assets for them. Coleby says in that way, Raise will become an equity engine for processing Africa’s hundreds of billion dollars of trade and securities volume.

Coleby says the number of companies going live is increasing 60% month-on-month. The platform manages about 200 cap tables with assets worth more than $400 million. The next phase of growth, according to Coleby, will be onboarding Series A and growth-stage companies onto the platform.

The company is active in Nigeria and Kenya. Coleby says a seed round is in the works to continue growing deeper into those markets and experiment with funding and liquidity operations across the African VC space.

Next, Raise is building a marketplace that continues connecting and educating investors, employees, and founders in one platform with their law firms to use trusted and verified data to do deals and issue stock options to employees.

Less than a year after its $3 million seed round, Verifiable snapped up another $17 million for its healthcare provider credentialing API toolkit.

The Austin-based company’s technology creates an infrastructure for healthcare provider data management that puts providers at the center. Verifiable founder Nick Macario told TechCrunch that data fuels critical operations across health systems and insurance carriers, like contracting, credentialing, enrollment, claims and directories. All of this is being done manually now, and often inaccurately, which is leading to billions of dollars of annual waste.

Verifiable’s infrastructure manages healthcare providers and automates the verification of provider data, enabling automation of business processes like credentialing, payer enrollment and network management for virtual healthcare platforms, health systems and insurance payers. It is able to reduce credentialing turnaround times by over 70%, Macario said.

Insurance payers is the newest part of the company’s expansion that includes verifying provider directories. For example, the information that pops up when someone performs an in-network search on their healthcare plan’s website to find a certain provider in their area.

The Altman brothers led the $17 million Series A round and was joined by David Sacks/Craft Ventures and a group of individual investors including Flexport’s Ryan Petersen, Rippling’s Parker Conrad, Front’s Mathilde Collin, Syapse’s Jonathan Hirsch, Todd Goldberg and Rahul Vohra. Tiger Global and existing investors also participated in the round.

Macario was also planning to raise another round of funding, but he said the combination of an inflection point with the product and Jack Altman’s continued investment interest made it a good time to start scaling the team.

Altman said the general space of healthcare technology has potential. It is also a topic near to him — his wife is a nurse. He was speaking to her about what Verifiable was working on, and she told him that there are still teams of people doing this.

“So much data is flowing through, and because healthcare is such a massive part of the country’s GDP, there is so much potential that can be unlocked,” Altman added. “I love Verifiable’s positioning around the provider. They are the people between the healthcare system and the patient, so to have access to their data, patients can form a relationship with them, which is a powerful position.”

In addition to expanding into insurance payers, Macario intends to use the new funding to double his team of 26 employees by the end of the year. The company has openings for engineers, operations and go-to-market talent.

Verifiable works with companies like Lyra Health, Talkspace, Modern Health, Headway, Wheel, Quartet Health, Forward and provider networks to automate credentialing, compliance processes and provider operations.

“Verifiable’s infrastructure has verified hundreds of thousands of providers and we plan to continue to double down on providers, use cases and payers,” Macario said.

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In Africa, chartering vessels and processing ocean freight can be challenging. The sector is largely inefficient and fragmented. Merchants also struggle to access finance to perform cross-border trade in the continent. A couple of digital freight companies are tackling this problem, like Nigerian-based MVX. The company today is announcing its $1.3 million seed round to bolster its efforts.

Tonye Membere-Otaji thought about the idea for MVX in 2016. Having worked in the maritime industry (running his family business and in a professional capacity building apps and websites for companies), Membere-Otaji was intrigued by how no online marketplace for vessels existed. 

“I decided to figure out how to solve that problem of finding vessels because there were too many intermediaries, which made processes difficult,” he told TechCrunch. However, a few issues relating to not having the right team to build out the product stalled the company’s progress. In 2019, Membere-Otaji finally launched the company with CTO Tobi Amusan after securing a $100,000 pre-seed investment from Oui Capital, a pan-African VC firm.

The company was called MVXchange at first. Its business model revolved around providing a support vessel booking platform that matched vessel chartering requests made by operators with available Offshore Support Vessels (OSVs). 

But in March 2020, the company made a sharp pivot and tweaked its model. CEO Membere-Otaji cites uncertainty of oil prices and the pandemic as reasons behind the decision. 

“We couldn’t see ourselves doing vessel chartering for the long term because the demand for fossil fuels will definitely reduce over the next few decades. We wanted to do something scalable, something that was impactful, and something that we could be proud of in the next 20 years,” he added.

What followed was the launch of MVXtransit, a digital freight booking platform, helping cargo owners find deals on moving containers across Nigeria. This April, the company launched MVXpay, a finance and payment solution to provide trade finance for freight operators. However, both offerings are now rolled into one: MVX.

According to the CEO, MVX wants to make freight shipping and trade finance easier for African businesses by bringing booking and deployment processes online. The startup has expanded beyond Nigeria and claims that merchants from the West African country, as well as Kenya, South Africa, Ghana and Rwanda, can use its platform to move freight in and out of their countries.

MVX charges a commission for the services provided, including trucking, warehousing, shipping, and cargo stuffing.

“We make it easy and convenient for businesses. Instead of trying to do everything themselves, which can be chaotic and cause distraction from their core businesses, we handle everything because we have all these service providers in one platform. So as shippers work with us, MVX works with like seven to 10 other service providers,” said Membere-Otaji.

The market for cross-border logistics services is said to hit revenues of $32 billion by 2025. Multiple companies are needed for the market to reach its full potential. That has been the case, and investors are noticing too. For instance, Ghana’s Jetstream offers a similar service and raised $3 million two months ago. SEND is another example; YC backs the startup.

However, what stands out for MVX, according to Membere-Otaji, is that the company also sees itself as a trade finance company.

The concept brings together the best of both worlds of fintech and trade. So the way it works is that with merchants looking to move shipments from Africa to the U.S. or China, some lack adequate capital to pay for freight or supply. With MVX, they can proceed to request credit. MVX passes it over to its financial partners, who lend to the consumers if they meet the minimum requirement. Next, MVX takes care of the shipment and delivers it abroad. Once the transaction is done, the merchant pays back, with all partners taking commissions.

“Our job really is to empower trade in Africa, and freight is a means to that. From every step involved in that process, from providing trade and finance to warehousing to payments processing, we want to play in all that space. There aren’t a lot of companies with that trading finance element doing that like us. And also, we see a huge potential in the offline market. Right now, the reason why we have this problem is that transactions are offline. Our strategy in capturing offline markets is also key.”

The pan-African freight company has already recorded more than 300 shipments this year but plans to end with 1,500. Per revenue and traction, the CEO claims the company has surpassed its 2020 numbers.

MVX raised money for its seed round from Africa-focused firms Kepple Africa, The Continent Venture Partners, Founders Factory, Launch Africa, and Capital Oak. Some angel investors in the U.S., Japan, Nigeria, and South Africa also participated. The two-year-old startup will use the investment to scale its operations, hire staff and improve its technology. MVX is also talking to investors to raise more money, most likely debt, for its trade financing product.

In a statement, Satoshi Shinada, general partner at Kepple Africa, said, “The trade sector in Africa is one that we believe is ripe for disruption. MVX is building a game-changing technology and platform to revolutionize how businesses in Africa move shipment and trade around the world.”

Data science platform Dataiku announced today it has raised a $400 million Series E, bringing its valuation to $4.6 billion. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from returning investors like ICONIQ Growth, CapitalG, FirstMark Capital, Battery Ventures, Snowflake Ventures and Dawn Capital.

New investors included Insight Partners, Eurazeo, Lightrock and Olivier Pomel, the chief executive of Datadog.

Dataiku’s last round of funding was a $100 million Series D in 2020.

Founded in 2013, Dataiku is used by data scientists, but also designed for business analysts and other people with less technical backgrounds. The platform lets companies design and deploy AI and analytics apps, turn raw data into advanced analytics and design machine learning models. It’s been used for a wide array of use cases, including fraud detection, customer churn prevention and supply chain optimization.

The company now has about 450 enterprise clients, including Unilever, Merck, GE, Ubisoft and NXP.

In June, Dataiku launched a fully managed version of the platform called Dataiku Online, which means the company takes care of setup and infrastructure. Co-founder and CEO Florian Douetteau told TechCrunch at the time Dataiku Online is focused on getting more startups and SMBs onto the platform.

In a statement about the investment, Tiger Global partner John Curtius said, “We’ve seen that executing an AI strategy in which data is part of day-to-day operations can have large-scale impact for organizations across sectors and sizes, and Dataiku is well-positioned to continue to help the enterprise realize this potential value given both the strength of their technology and the team.”

Though 2021 is far from over, it’s already witnessed a record level of venture capital activity in the technology sector. With larger round sizes announced daily, founders may have their pick of term sheets — but they need to think critically and strategically about which firms to add to their cap table.

So far this year, we’ve seen $292.4 billion in venture financing across the globe, of which $138.9 billion was raised in the United States. Specific to tech companies, the capital is only accelerating: In Q2, founders raised 157% more capital compared to the same period last year, according to the latest data from CB Insights.

It’s not just that more companies are raising money — they are doing so at a higher valuation. Median seed and Series A stage valuations today stand at $12 million and $42 million, respectively, up 20% to 30% from 2020. This can be partly attributed to growing exits/M&A activity in the technology sector, a record number of IPOs and a general bullishness around technology, as well as low interest rates and liquidity in the market.

At a time when we are witnessing record VC activity, founders would be well served to go back to the basics and focus on the principles of fundraising when determining who sits on their cap table. Here are a few pointers for founders in that direction:

1. Value > valuation

Good VCs who are aligned with a startup’s vision create more value than the dollars they bring to the table. Typically, such value is created across a few distinct functions — product, sales, domain expertise, business development and recruiting, to name a few — based on the background of the partners of the fund and the composition of their limited partners (investors in the venture fund).

Further, the right VC can serve as an authentic, objective sounding board for CEOs, which can be an asset to have as a startup navigates uncertainty and the typical challenges that come with scaling a young company. As founders assess multiple term sheets, it’s worth thinking through whether they should optimize for VCs who offer the highest valuation, or for ones who bring the most value to the table.

2. A two-way street

Running an efficient fundraising process, in part, entails holding VCs accountable to their own diligence requests. While it is unfortunately common for VCs to request a lot of data upfront, startups should share information after assessing intent and appetite on the investors’ part.

For every additional data request, founders are well within their rights (and should) check with their potential investors on where the process stands and get indicative timelines for moving forward with next steps. Mark Suster said it best: “Data rooms are where fundraising processes go to die.”

What’s the board’s role in an early-stage startup?

Startup founders frequently ask me about the role of a board of directors. A board can be a crucial asset in an early-stage startup.

Here’s a framework for how it can help drive success at your company: Strategy, People, Image, Finance and Systems for compliance, or “SPIFS.”

What is a board of directors, anyway?

The board of directors helps with governance of the company. U.S. law requires that any company have one, though does not require how big it should be. By generic definition, the board of directors consists of elected individuals that represent shareholders. It is the governing body that provides company oversight and helps set business policy and strategy.

On a more practical level and in a startup environment, the board can aid in creating a successful business strategy, putting together the right management team, developing branding, building good financial habits, and avoiding legal and compliance issues. The needs and composition of the board will change depending on the startup’s stage, management and financing history (e.g., if there are preferred shareholders, investors that require a board seat and more).

Investors often ask founders about their board for two reasons. First, it says a lot about their character, their judgment and their willingness to be challenged. The founder can typically choose who is on their board (through careful selection of investors and advisers) and negotiate a board structure they prefer.

Typically, a healthy board will have a good balance between common shareholders, preferred shareholders and independents. It also helps investors and analysts understand who will ask critical questions and give important advice to the company’s executive management, especially when the going gets tough (it inevitably does!).

What exactly can a board help you do?

After 20 years as a venture capitalist and board member, I boiled down the value of a board into five main pieces under the acronym SPIFS: Strategy, People, Image, Finance and Systems for compliance.

Strategy

Setting business strategy is one of the main ways that the board helps founders, especially if it’s their first time running a business. It is a valuable sounding board for validating that you have taken a sober account of the market and have the right plan to develop your product and acquire customers.

The board should ask these questions when guiding founders through setting strategy:

The future of technology is determined by a handful of venture capitalists. The world’s 10 leading venture capital firms have, together, invested over $150 billion in technology startups. The venture capitalists who run these firms decide which startups today will develop the new platforms and technologies that will shape our lives tomorrow.

There is a startling lack of diversity within the venture capital sector. This means that a small group of men — mostly white men — make decisions that affect all of us. Unsurprisingly, they all too often ignore the broader societal and human rights implications of these investment decisions.

We all live in a world shaped by venture capital. As of 2019, 81% of all venture capital funds worldwide are clustered in just a handful of countries, primarily in the U.S., Europe and China, which in turn are shaping the future of technology. If you spend time on Facebook or Twitter, use Google, travel in an Uber or stay in an Airbnb, then you’ve experienced firsthand the impact of venture capital funding.

Venture capital firms, which provide equity financing for early- and growth-stage startups, play a critical gatekeeper role, deciding which new technologies and technology companies will receive funding.

All businesses — including venture capital — have a responsibility to respect human rights. In order to ensure that their investments are not undermining our human rights, it is therefore critical for venture capital firms to conduct due diligence processes before making investments.

Amnesty International recently surveyed the world’s largest venture capital firms and startup accelerators. Of the world’s 10 largest venture capital firms, not a single one had an adequate human rights due diligence process that met the standards set forth in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Unfortunately, this is true of the broader venture capital sector as well. Overall, of the 50 VC firms and three startup accelerators analyzed by Amnesty International, we found that almost all of them lacked adequate human rights due diligence policies and processes.

This failure to carry out adequate due diligence means that a vast majority of VC firms are failing in their responsibility to respect human rights.

This almost complete lack of respect for human rights among the world’s largest venture capital firms has three key impacts. First, and most immediately, it means that venture capital firms invest in companies whose products and services have been implicated in ongoing human rights abuses, such as companies that provide support to the Chinese government’s repression of the Uyghur population in Xinjiang and across China.

Second, it means that venture capital firms continue to fund companies whose business models have a significant negative impact on human rights, including our privacy and labor rights. For instance, leading venture capital firms continue to support companies that rely on app-based or “gig” workers, who often face exploitative or otherwise abusive work conditions, as well as companies whose “surveillance capitalism” business model undermines our right to privacy.

Third, the lack of human rights due diligence by venture capital firms dramatically increases the risk that they fund new and “frontier” technologies without ensuring that adequate human rights safeguards are in place.

For instance, the application of increasingly powerful artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) tools across a wide variety of sectors risks amplifying existing societal biases and discrimination. Seemingly objective algorithms can be biased by reliance on incomplete or unrepresentative training data, and/or by replicating the unconscious bias of those who developed the algorithms.

This is a critical blind spot, especially as VC-funded startups seek to disrupt such fundamental parts of our lives as education, finance and health.

The negative impacts of the VC firms’ lack of human rights due diligence — especially regarding issues like algorithmic bias — are magnified by these firms’ own lack of gender and racial diversity. For instance, women comprise only 23% of venture capital investment professionals (i.e., those involved in deciding which startups to fund).

The numbers are even worse when it comes to racial diversity — just 4% of investment professionals at VC firms in the U.S. are Latinx, and only 4% are Black. Groups like Blck VC, Diversity VC and digitalundivided have been calling attention to this issue for years, but venture capitalists have been slow to respond so far.

This lack of diversity is mirrored in the gender and racial composition of founders who receive VC funding. In 2018, all-female founding teams received just 2.2% of all U.S.-based venture funding. At the same time, Black and Latinx founders received less than 2.3% of all U.S.-based venture capital funding in 2019.

With power comes responsibility. Venture capital firms need to institute human rights due diligence processes that meet the standards set forth in the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights.

Further, they should provide support to their portfolio companies to ensure that they comply with human rights standards. Venture capital firms should also publicly commit to hiring more diverse teams, especially in investment-related positions. Finally, they should publicly commit to funding more diverse startup founders as part of their flagship funds.

VC firms have a responsibility to ensure that their investments are not causing harm. A responsibility that they have, to date, largely ignored.

Japanese startup ispace has raised $46 million in a fresh round of Series C funding as it looks to complete three lunar lander missions in three years.

The funding will go toward the second and third of the planned missions, scheduled for 2023 and 2024. The first mission, which ispace aims to conduct in the latter half of 2022, is being furnished by earlier financing.

The Series C was led by Japanese VC firm Incubate Fund, with additional investment from partnerships managed by Innovation Engine, funds managed by SBI Investment Co., Katsunori Sago, Aizawa Investments and funds managed by HiJoJo Partners and Aizawa Asset Management. Incubate Fund’s investments in ispace stretch back to the company’s seed round in 2014.

Ispace’s total funding now stands at $195.5 million.

The company said last month it had started building the lunar landing flight module for the 2022 mission at a facility owned by space launch company ArianeGroup, in Lampoldshausen, Germany. The lander for that first mission, the Hakuto-R, will take three months to reach the moon, largely to save costs and additional weight from propellant. It will deliver a 22-pound rover for Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center, a lunar robot for the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and payload from three Canadian companies. The lander will reach the moon aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The 7.5 foot-tall Hakuto-R will also be used in the second mission in 2023, to deposit a small ispace rover that will collect data to support the company’s subsequent missions to the moon. For the final mission, the Toyko-based startup is developing a larger lander in the United States.

Ispace describes its long-term goal as being a “gateway for private sector companies to bring their business to the Moon.” The company has particular interest in helping spur a space-based economy, noting on its website that the moon’s water resources represent “untapped potential.”

Here’s another edition of “Dear Sophie,” the advice column that answers immigration-related questions about working at technology companies.

“Your questions are vital to the spread of knowledge that allows people all over the world to rise above borders and pursue their dreams,” says Sophie Alcorn, a Silicon Valley immigration attorney. “Whether you’re in people ops, a founder or seeking a job in Silicon Valley, I would love to answer your questions in my next column.”

Extra Crunch members receive access to weekly “Dear Sophie” columns; use promo code ALCORN to purchase a one- or two-year subscription for 50% off.

Dear Sophie,

I’ve been working on an H-1B in the U.S. for nearly two years.

While I’m immensely appreciative of my company’s sponsorship and that I made it through the H-1B lottery and am working, I’m stuck in a rut. I really want to start something of my own and work on my own terms in the United States.

Are there any immigration options that would allow me to do that?

— Seeking Satisfaction near Stanford

Dear Seeking,

A couple of exciting immigration news updates to get us started today! In breaking startup founder news, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced the LIKE Act for startup founders in the House of Representatives last week. Below, we’ll share what this could mean for your startup aspirations. Also, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) conducted a second H-1B lottery because it didn’t receive enough H-1B petitions to meet the annual cap. So, if you or your employer were selected, be sure to file an H-1B petition by November 3.

Although job dissatisfaction and frustration on an H-1B can be normal, according to Edward Gorbis, there’s a lot you can do to take control of your U.S. immigration situation and go out on your own. I interviewed Gorbis for my podcast; he’s the founder of Career Meets World and a performance coach who works with immigrants and first-generation professionals to help them find fulfillment and thrive in their careers and life. Gorbis said that “once immigrants reach stability, they start to think, ‘Who am I, what do I value, what’s my core identity?’” It’s possible for any of us to retrain our brain for success.

Gorbis said that imagining overcoming the hurdles that stand in the way of doing the work that will fulfill you is the first step. So, here are some options that can help you imagine how to build the life of your dreams.

Become a founding CEO and raise $250,000

A great new option for aspiring entrepreneurs is International Entrepreneur Parole (IEP), a new immigration program in the United States that allows CEOs, CTOs and others to live in the U.S. and run their company for 2.5 years with an option for a 2.5-year extension. Your spouse can obtain a work permit.

How to qualify? You need to own at least 10% of a U.S. company, such as a Delaware C corporation registered in California. Ideally, you’ll want to show that your company bank account has at least $250,000 raised from qualified U.S. investors, but you can use other evidence to demonstrate that your company has the potential to grow rapidly and create jobs in the U.S.

A startup visa and path to a green card may be soon on the way for entrepreneurs and their crucial employees: Last week, Lofgren introduced the Let Immigrants Kickstart Employment (LIKE) Act. The requirements for the proposed startup visa are the same as for IEP but would allow a longer stay — up to eight years total if the startup creates jobs and generates substantial revenue.

I’m very proud to have aided in drafting the LIKE Act. It’s a thrill to see how my suggestions were included, such as making Startup Green Cards not subject to the visa bulletin, clarifying that you can seek consecutive Startup Visas from different companies, how to allocate employee visas to startups, ensuring the Startup Visa is a dual intent status, and adding premium processing. It was such a joy to be able to contribute ideas to this amazing process. I look forward to supporting this bill to become a law; please reach out to me if you want to support this worthy cause.

See yourself at another company

There is technically no limit to how many H-1B employers you can have or how many — or few — hours you work in an H-1B position. So, think about other companies.

One option would be to have concurrent H-1Bs: Keep your current H-1B job for stability and start your own company, preferably with another individual or two, and have your startup sponsor you for an H-1B. Take a look at this Dear Sophie column for what to do before embarking on this path.

Another option would be to transfer your H-1B to another employer, or your own startup if you are going to work there. Since you already went through the H-1B lottery with your current employer, you will not have to go through the lottery process again for a second H-1B whether you choose the concurrent or transfer option.

Setting up a startup that can sponsor you for an H-1B is complicated, so I suggest you work with both a corporate attorney and an immigration attorney. Keep in mind that you will not be able to do any work for your startup until an H-1B with your startup has been approved, which is why having co-founders is helpful. Another reason is H-1Bs require an employer-employee relationship between a startup and the H-1B candidate. That means a co-founder — or the startup’s board — must supervise you and have the ability to fire you. Moreover, we often advise founders that it may be best to own less than a 50% stake in the startup when applying for an H-1B.

Consider a green card

If you end up pursuing concurrent H-1Bs, consider asking your employer whether it is willing to sponsor you for a green card. If that’s not the case, your startup can sponsor you for one, or you can self-petition for a green card:

All EB-2 green cards — except the EB-2 NIW — and the EB-3 green card require labor certification approval (PERM) from the U.S. Department of Labor. The two green cards that allow an individual to self-sponsor are the EB-1A and EB-2 NIW.

Imagine yourself doing gigs in your field

Many startup founders qualify for an O-1A extraordinary ability visa. However, you cannot have both an H-1B and an O-1A at the same time, so if your startup sponsors you for an O-1A, you will be required to leave your current H-1B job once an O-1A is approved.

An O-1A offers more flexibility than an H-1B. You can work for a single petitioning company or on multiple gigs through an agent. However, qualifying for an O-1A is more difficult than an H-1B. Resources, such as through my firm, support people with getting qualified. The one similarity with the H-1B is that you must show your startup and you have an employer-employee relationship.

Invest in your own company

The E-2 visa for treaty investors and employees is ideal for startup founders whose home country has a treaty of commerce and navigation with the U.S. Here is a list of treaty countries. For more details on E-2 visas for founders and employees, check out this previous Dear Sophie column and podcast episode.

Although there is no minimum dollar amount that a founder must invest in a startup to qualify for an E-2, we often advise founders to invest at least $100,000 to have a strong case. You cannot have both an H-1B and an E-2, so you will need to leave your current H-1B job if your E-2 is approved.

An immigration attorney can offer additional options based on your personal circumstances and legal advice tailored to you.

Enjoy the journey of building your dreams!

Sophie

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The information provided in “Dear Sophie” is general information and not legal advice. For more information on the limitations of “Dear Sophie,” please view our full disclaimer. You can contact Sophie directly at Alcorn Immigration Law.

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