Alma

Alma is an immigration law firm built for employment-based US visas and green cards, covering categories like O-1, H-1B, EB-1A, and EB-2 NIW for startup founders, researchers, and engineers, plus the companies hiring them. Every case is directed by an attorney who owns the strategy and the filing, supported by an AI-powered platform and case intelligence layer, and the firm reports <cite name="tryalma" index="3-0">a 98%+ approval rate</cite> across filings. For teams weighing whether to sponsor a strong candidate, the pitch is that legal review stops being the bottleneck that kills the hire. The launch marks Alma's Series A. Alma raised $17 million in a Series A round led by Bling Capital, with Forerunner, MVP Ventures, Interplay VC, and GSBackers also participating , adding to earlier backing from Village Global, NFX, Conviction, and NEA. The timing lines up with a broader push into company-side workflows, including contractually binding, real-time SLAs, SOC 2 Type II compliance, and HRIS and ATS integrations across Workday, Rippling, Greenhouse and similar systems, which is what makes Alma usable inside a scaling AI company rather than as a one-off vendor. The company was founded by Aizada Marat, Shuo Chen, and Assel Tuleubayeva, with Marat as CEO. Marat grew up in rural Kyrgyzstan and came to the US at 17 through a State Department exchange program before working at McKinsey and Cooley and attending Harvard Law, and she has framed Alma as an attempt to rebuild a legal category that most founders currently treat as a tax on hiring. The Series A signals that investors see room for an attorney-led, software-native firm to take share from traditional immigration practices as AI companies race to lock in scarce technical talent.