An ex-Microsoft scientist is building an AI startup to change how companies handle work visas

Priyanka Kulkarni

Casium

Casium is taking on the US visa system with its AI-enabled processing tool.
Founder Priyanka Kulkarni is using her experience of the immigration system to help employers.
Maverick Ventures recently led the company’s $5 million seed funding.

America’s visa system is a labyrinth that Priyanka Kulkarni, a 34-year-old machine learning scientist, knows all too well. After spending nine years on a visa, she’s now using artificial intelligence to help people find the path to employment-based immigration.

Her startup, Casium, sells employers a portal to run visa cases end-to-end, replacing the Excel spreadsheets and, in many instances, the outside law firms that they usually rely on.

It’s a product built for the quickly changing landscape of employment immigration. Immigration policy has swung in recent months, culminating in the Trump administration’s surprise executive order requiring companies to pay a $100,000 fee for each new H-1B application. While some companies welcomed the change, the move also sent employers scrambling and sparked lawsuits from business groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Casium’s bet is that a tech-first approach can bring speed and transparency to a system that’s often beset with delays and confusion.

The company says it has assisted hundreds of candidates through assessments, compliance reviews, and actual filings, citing an “exceptionally high approval rate.” In several cases, founders who hired Casium went from intake to on-the-job start in under a month, Kulkarni says.

Investors are on board. In recent months, Casium, founded in 2024, secured $5 million in a seed funding round led by Maverick Ventures, with participation from the Ai2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and angel investor Jake Heller, whose startup Casetext was acquired by Thomson Reuters in 2023. The company declined to share its valuation.

An agentic approach to immigration

People in matching branded tees pose for a photo — Casium employees.

Casium

Here’s how it works. A candidate fills out an intake form. Then, Kulkarni said, a swarm of “agents” — software that can execute tasks autonomously — scours public data such as scholarly journals and patents to learn about the candidate.

Within minutes, she said, Casium generates a dossier and recommends the most suitable visa. H-1B, O-1, and EB-1A are among its most commonly issued employment-based visas.

The company then routes the report to a pool of independent, licensed lawyers and paralegals contracting with Casium. One click, Kulkarni said, produces a draft attorney letter laying out the candidate’s eligibility.

Kulkarni said its tech shrinks the time it takes to gather the paperwork for an application — from three to six months working with a traditional law firm to less than 10 business days — and helps catch errors, which could help more candidates sail through the process.

Casium offers initial assessments for free and charges a flat fee for filings based on visa type and case complexity. It declined to specify the price. Kulkarni says the company is also developing a subscription model to give employers more options for ongoing support.

Venture money is piling up behind the bet that software can steer people through the immigration maze. Parley sells drafting and filing tools to immigration law firms. OpenLaw is building a marketplace to match clients and lawyers, including immigration attorneys.

Closest to Casium are Manifest Law and Plymouth, which similarly use technology to help employers hire and retain international talent. Boundless, another lawyer-plus-software hybrid, has raised more than $50 million in funding to date, according to the company.

The pitch is seductive, but the risks are also concrete. Employers will weigh a lawyer’s track record on specific visa types against a startup’s black-box automation. To be fair, startups already own big slices of the human resources stack, from recruiting to benefits to payroll. In that light, Kulkarni argues that immigration is simply the last, high-stakes workflow to be digitized.

Firsthand experience

Born and raised in India, Kulkarni was hired straight out of college to join Microsoft. There, she spent nearly a decade as a machine learning scientist, helping to shape AI strategy for enterprise products like Office. She did it on an H-1B visa. The visa is awarded by lottery and tied to one employer, a setup that can make workers anxious about layoffs and hesitant to switch jobs because a new sponsor isn’t guaranteed.

“Honestly, it was exhausting, confusing, and at times can feel very career-limiting,” Kulkarni said.

United States Citizenship and Immigration Services and Microsoft did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Kulkarni had long wanted to start a company, and when the Ai2 Incubator in Seattle offered her a spot in its 2024 cohort, she applied for an EB-1 visa, also known as the “Einstein visa” for foreign nationals with extraordinary abilities. She worked with a law firm for three months to wrangle the paperwork.

On her first day, when a managing director asked what she wanted to build, she didn’t hesitate to say immigration tech. “Everything I’ve done,” she said, “has culminated to this point.”

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