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Investors and builders often emphasize the importance of a founder's firsthand experience with the problem they're solving, along with grit and resilience. Few entrepreneurs embody these traits more than the founding team of Alma, a new law firm revolutionizing immigration services. Alma’s CEO and Cofounder Aizada Marat spent 5 grueling years navigating the US immigration process after attending Harvard Law School for a graduate program and kicking off her law career. Getting to Harvard from her native Kyrgyzstan wasn’t easy, either. Unable to fully cover tuition costs, she crowdfunded her own education, and hustled her campaign all the way to the President of Kyrgyzstan (he granted her ~$9K...no big deal). Later, when working to secure a visa to work at Cooley LLP, she dealt with mountains of paperwork and costs, and repeated, inaccurate guidance and dead-ends that ultimately led to her not being able to work for almost 1.5 years. A process this cumbersome and expensive might have led many to abandon efforts, but Aizada’s determination was only sharpened — and she decided she would solve this problem one day. When it comes to firsthand passion and grit, Aizada’s energy is unmatched — perhaps except by only her co-founders, Assel Tuleubayeva and Shuo Chen, who immigrated here from Kazakhstan and China, respectively, and went on to perform at the tops of their fields. Launching later this year, Alma will make it dramatically easier, faster and cheaper for immigrants to come the US to work. Alma’s offering is especially powerful within the context of its market, which is highly fragmented and inconsistent: 90% immigration law is dispersed across 20k+ firms, with no clear place for consumers to turn. Not only will Alma provide transformational value for the millions of people looking to bring their talents to the US, and enrich the fabric of our country along the way; the model also fits squarely within our thesis at Forerunner about AI-Native Services Firms, where a new generation of firms are being built that centralize AI productivity in-house to operate with fundamentally greater flexibility and scale. Let’s go Alma — excited to be a part of the journey, alongside Benjamin Ling & Bling Capital, Conviction, Village Global, NFX, MVP Ventures, New Enterprise Associates (NEA) and Silkroad Innovation Hub. https://lnkd.in/gUxep8cn