Emmanuel Olorunsheyi has worked at some of tech's most recognizable names—Amazon, Microsoft, Dell, Ford, and Rackspace. But when he needed help navigating U.S. immigration himself, he turned to Diana Melendez, then a paralegal and consultant who handled his cases. Now Melendez is the COO of the company they built together, and Immigify closed a million-dollar funding round in July 2026 to scale an AI platform designed to automate one of America's most grinding bureaucratic challenges.
The Omaha-based startup announced it raised $1.015 million in pre-seed capital, led by Chicago's M25, with participation from Invest Nebraska, Nelnet, NMotion, and angel investor Kevin Pope. The haul more than doubled Immigify's original target of half a million—a signal, perhaps, that investors see opportunity in applying automation to a system that chews through paralegal hours and attorney fees at a remarkable clip.
A Midwest Bet on Immigration Tech
M25's lead check anchors what is essentially a regional syndicate. The firm, which has carved out a niche backing early-stage Midwest startups, joins Nebraska-focused backers including Invest Nebraska and Nelnet, the latter better known for its footprint in education finance. NMotion—the gener8tor-powered accelerator that brought Immigify into its Spring 2025 cohort—also put money in. (NMotion typically invests $100,000 via SAFE note for 7.5% equity, a structure Immigify went through before being tapped for Techstars' Workforce Development Accelerator the same year.)
The capital composition tells a story about where immigration tech finds early traction: not in Silicon Valley, but in places like Omaha, where workforce pipelines and regional economic development intersect with pragmatic bets on automation.
The Team Behind the Platform
Olorunsheyi and co-founder Ayodeji Niyi-Adesola, who serves as CTO, launched Immigify in 2024. Both brought startup scar tissue from prior ventures, including a web hosting outfit called HostNowNow and an auto marketplace, TokunboCars.NG, that operated in Nigeria. Olorunsheyi's resume reads like a tour through enterprise tech: product and leadership stints at Rackspace, Ford, and the usual suspects in Seattle and Austin.
But it's the Melendez connection that grounds the founding story in something more personal. She wasn't just a hire—she was the person who knew firsthand how much friction lives in every visa application, every compliance check, every form that needs a second set of eyes. When she joined as COO, the company gained someone who'd already seen the bottlenecks from the inside.
What Immigify Actually Does
The platform targets three segments: businesses managing visa sponsorships and compliance headaches, universities juggling international student immigration, and individuals trying to navigate the system on their own. Immigify deploys what it calls "AI agents" to automate eligibility assessments, document prep, form-filling, and compliance monitoring—all tasks that typically eat up paralegal bandwidth or require attorney oversight.
The company says it has racked up more than 400 visa approvals so far, though it doesn't break out how those are distributed across customer types or visa categories. One partnership stands out: a collaboration with AfroHealth to train and place Nigerian healthcare assistants through EB-3 visa pathways, covering 250 candidates. It's the kind of vertical play that hints at where Immigify sees traction—sectors with acute labor shortages and high-volume immigration needs.
The Omaha Gambit
Immigify relocated to Omaha in 2025, setting up shop at the Scott Data Center with backing from the Greater Omaha Chamber. The move wasn't arbitrary. Omaha has been trying to build a pipeline of tech talent and startup activity, and immigration tech aligns neatly with workforce development priorities—especially in a state where agriculture, healthcare, and logistics rely heavily on immigrant labor.
The fresh capital will flow into product development and scaling across those three customer verticals. Whether AI can genuinely compress the time and cost of immigration processing remains an open question. The system is notoriously opaque, rules shift with political winds, and edge cases abound. But the market is undeniably there.
Foreign-born workers made up just over 19% of the U.S. labor force as of recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, and the Department of Homeland Security has estimated millions of nonimmigrant residents navigate the system each year. If Immigify can carve out even a slice of that complexity—and turn it into something faster, cheaper, and less maddening—it will have found its wedge.
For now, the bet is that the founders understand the problem well enough to build something that works. And that investors believe a million dollars is enough runway to prove it.
