The U.S. immigration system is complex, hard to navigate, and expensive for immigrants. The startup JustiGuide claims it can help with that thanks to an AI-powered portal.
The idea is to help immigrants in the U.S. — and eventually in other countries — understand the law and what visas they may be eligible for, and to connect with immigration attorneys, making the whole process cheaper and faster.
“I think the more we make the technology accessible, I think people will be empowered to try and fill their own forms and understand what their options are and that they will be able to use lawyers for just the review process,” JustiGuide’s founder Bisi Obateru told TechCrunch.
Obateru, who is from Nigeria, recalled how he had to navigate the U.S. immigration system after he finished his studies in the country. Since then, he got an H1-B visa, a common visa for tech workers, and then a permanent residency green card.
That inspired him to launch JustiGuide to help fellow immigrants. “Immigrants can come in and basically speak in their native tongue and understand what their immigration journey can be,” he said.
The company won best pitch in the Policy + Protection category at TechCrunch’s Disrupt conference this year.
JustiGuide’s customers, according to Obateru, are startup founders who need help hiring immigrants, individuals who have an H1-B and are looking for other options, international students thinking of starting their own business, as well as lawyers and law firms. But he also hopes that one day perhaps government institutions will also want to license the technology.
The platform consists of an AI legal research assistant, a system that pairs lawyers and immigrants, and it promises to speed up the process of filling out forms. The latter is done by giving lawyers a service that helps them compile documents and streamline processes that a paralegal may otherwise do, Obateru explained.
According to Obateru, the platform, which has 47,000 users, relies on an AI he called Dolores, “a continuous refining domain-specific AI that understands U.S. immigration.” Dolores also does translations to 12 languages.
Dolores was trained on over 40,000 court cases, which JustiGuide sourced from the Free Law Project, a nonprofit that provides free access to legal materials, according to Obateru. The startup is also in the process of registering as a law firm so it can directly connect its users and customers with its own immigration lawyers, he said.
At the beginning, JustiGuide programmed Dolores to — based on keywords — go around and scan subreddits, Facebook groups, Instagram and LinkedIn posts, looking for immigrants who needed help, and messaged them with answers, according to Obateru.
To protect immigrants’ privacy, JustiGuide’s platform is stored on-prem and encrypted, and only when an immigrant connects to a lawyer is the information exchanged. Some user information is also anonymized, said Obateru.