Welcome Technologies, a Los Angeles startup dedicated to supporting immigrants, announced Tuesday it raised $8 million in Series A funding.
Often, when immigrants arrive in a new country, they rely on word of mouth and trial and error to figure how to navigate the ins and outs of society. Welcome Technologies CEO and co-founder Amir Hemmat says that, in the best cases, this is inefficient. In the worst cases, it’s predatory.
“We see this consistent issue of the government focused on security and citizenship, but not really helping to solve more of the practical needs of immigrants who are establishing themselves and trying to build a life in the United States,” Hemmat told Built In. “The U.S., similar to other countries in the world, has never had a formal onboarding, integration and support platform. There is no digital Ellis Island.”
So Welcome Technologies built a platform that arms immigrants with the support they need to establish a life for themselves, connecting them to financial, housing and educational services. Users can turn to the platform for information on everything from banking to health insurance.
The idea for this company was born out of personal experience.
Hemmat was born to Iranian immigrants who came to the U.S. just before the revolution in the late 1970s and his co-founder, Raul Lomeli-Azoubel, is the son of Mexican migrant farmworkers. Prior to Welcome Technologies, the men founded SABEResPODER, another Los Angeles-based company that provided educational services to Latinx immigrants in the U.S. There, they realized most immigrants face the same kinds of issues when establishing themselves in the States and that there was no formal system in place to make it any easier.
“It’s kind of crazy that in the U.S. you leave it completely to chance,” Hemmat said. “This population that contributes trillions of dollars to our GDP every year, we kind of let them figure it out, sink or swim versus enabling them. We realized that there was this opportunity to really build a better operating system for immigration, where we could sort of flip the experience on its head and go from a really frustrating, challenging one to a really empowering one.”
Hemmat says Welcome Technologies will use this funding to grow its team. The company also announced Tuesday that it welcomed several tech veterans, including founders from Tinder and Hulu, onboard. Next, the company is planning to expand its mobile user base from two million to 10 million over the next three years.
For now, the company is focusing on immigrants coming to the U.S., but in the long run Hemmat says Welcome Technologies’ approach could be applied worldwide.
“Across the globe, every country is really challenged with this and they’re not really coming up with a solution,” Hemmat said. “We think the U.S. can be the first country to provide a solid solution to this issue and to do it through technology and an innovative business model.”
