Casium, an AI-powered immigration and mobility solution for enterprises that combines licensed legal expertise with cutting-edge technology, today announced a $5 million seed funding round led by Maverick Ventures. The round included participation from the AI2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and angel investor Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext. The funding will accelerate Casium's mission to transform immigration from a reactive bottleneck into a proactive workforce planning tool, helping employers access and retain top global talent at unprecedented speed and scale.

The talent gap has reached a crisis point. U.S. employers needed more than 350,000 highly skilled professionals who were blocked by H-1B lottery restrictions alone. Across industries, 71 percent of employers report difficulty finding qualified workers, a challenge most acute in AI where 1.8 percent of all U.S. job postings now require AI-related skills. With more than two-thirds of AI researchers in the United States born abroad, the data underscores how deeply American innovation depends on global talent.

Recent policy changes, including new H-1B visa structures, have added complexity to an already challenging landscape. More than 442,000 workers compete for just 85,000 H-1B visa slots annually. Adding to these challenges, the recent launch of Project Firewall by the U.S. Department of Labor signals heightened enforcement of H-1B compliance, making strategic immigration planning and airtight documentation more critical than ever for employers seeking to access global talent.

Casium is addressing these challenges with a fundamentally new approach to business immigration. "Companies can no longer afford to treat immigration as an afterthought or rely on outdated processes that lead to delays, denials, or costly mistakes,” said Priyanka Kulkarni, CEO and founder of Casium. “Employers need absolute certainty in their immigration strategy. That's exactly what our outcome-based approach delivers. Through its ‘Outcome-as-a-Service’ model, Casium replaces transactional processing with a results-driven system where clients pay for defined outcomes. Instead of treating visa processing as one-time transactions, Casium commits to measurable outcomes, shifting from reactive to proactive service delivery, and aligning the provider's success directly with the customer's success.”

Casium helps employers achieve consistent, high-quality immigration outcomes by combining expert legal judgment with adaptive AI. The platform unifies strategy, filing, and comprehensive compliance management into one connected system, eliminating the need for multiple providers or manual workflows. Its agentic workflows automate routine tasks and learn from attorney feedback in real time, making each case faster and smarter. This gives employers clear visa strategies, transparent costs, and confident compliance, helping them minimize risk and maximize ROI compared to traditional models.

"We've always believed that immigration should be treated as a strategic business process, not a compliance afterthought,” Kulkarni explained. “Our clients don't just get their visas approved, they get certainty, speed, and strategic guidance that turns immigration into a competitive advantage."

Casium already works with employers from early-stage startups to Series F companies and has guided hundreds of individuals through visa assessments, compliance reviews, and immigration filings. In several cases, founders have gone from initial evaluation to on-the-job start in under a month.

“Working with Casium felt like a next-generation experience compared to traditional immigration processes,” said Surbhi Rathore, Vice President of AI Product and Strategy at Invoca and former CEO of Symbl.ai. “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.”

Kulkarni launched the company in 2024 after navigating her own complex immigration journey and spending a decade leading AI initiatives at Microsoft that scaled to millions of users. As a Principal Science Manager in Azure's AI group, she drove the AI strategy for enterprise products including Office AI and Microsoft's enterprise AI suite, managing cross-functional teams and delivering AI features used by Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Having personally experienced the inefficiencies of the immigration system while helping Microsoft recruit international talent for critical AI roles, Kulkarni recognized that the industry needed fundamental reimagining.

"Priyanka has a rare combination of founder-market fit and deep AI expertise that got us incredibly excited to partner with Casium,” said Ryan Isono, Managing Director at Maverick Ventures. “At Microsoft, she deployed state of the art natural language research for large enterprises and millions of users worldwide, while simultaneously navigating the complexities of the immigration process firsthand. She is the perfect founder to reinvent the manual, text heavy processes of employment immigration and compliance with a truly AI-native platform. Casium not only addresses the billions of dollars employers currently spend on outdated service providers, but also solves one of the highest priorities for companies in this AI era: access to the best talent."

“Priyanka is exactly the kind of founder we back at AI2 Incubator, someone who's lived the problem, built deep technical expertise at scale, and has the vision to fundamentally reimagine a broken system," said Jacob Colker, Co-Founder and Managing Director at AI2 Incubator. “Immigration isn't just a compliance headache; it's a critical competitive advantage for companies trying to access the best talent in the world. Casium is turning that insight into reality, and we're thrilled to support Priyanka and her team as they build the infrastructure that innovation-driven companies desperately need."

The funding will accelerate Casium's mission to help employers turn immigration into a strategic advantage, enabling them to access and retain top global talent at unprecedented speed and scale. For more information on Casium's platform and services, please visit www.casium.com.

About Casium: Founded in Seattle in 2024 with support from the AI2 Incubator, Casium is rearchitecting immigration for employers competing in a global talent market. Casium brings together licensed immigration expertise and state-of-the-art AI to deliver a complete solution for recruiting, retaining, and supporting international employees at scale. The result is faster, more predictable outcomes that turn immigration from a compliance burden into a strategic advantage for innovation and growth.

About Maverick Ventures: Maverick Ventures is the venture arm of multi-billion-dollar investment firm Maverick Capital. With over 30 years of early-stage investment experience, Maverick Ventures has funded more than 100 companies across healthcare, software, and deep technology. The team typically leads rounds, takes board seats, and works closely with management to build successful enterprises.

About AI2 Incubator: The AI2 Incubator is a founder-focused startup incubator with a proven track record of launching AI-first companies. Born from the Paul Allen Institute for AI, the incubator combines research excellence, deep technical expertise, and the visionary spirit of the Pacific Northwest AI community.

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