美国公司投资外国创新者

An American company is providing foreign talents an opportunity to pursue their business ideas in the US. It is directly investing in these would-be entrepreneurs, providing them with temporary visas while letting them work full-time on their start-up dreams.

Doing whatever it takes to make a dream come true. H-1B visa holder, Ganesh Iyer founded IceBreaker Q - an app that connects like-minded people at professional and social gatherings. He works 70 hours a week as a business operations manager at a major tech company while spending another 20 hours a week on his startup, also with a number of restrictions on what role he can play.

"It becomes much more tougher task if you are on an H1-B to not only pursue what you have, but also pursue any new ideas you may have," Iyer said.

H1-B visa holder Nitin Pachisia understands the dilemma of coming up with a great idea but not being allowed to pursue it full-time. That spurred his latest idea - an angel fund that gets entrepreneurs H-1 B visas while letting them pursue their startup dreams full- time.

"Venture Capitalists are investing in people, micro funds are investing in people. And they know there is an untapped pool of talent that we can unleash by giving them this opportunity. They are investing in the possibility that Unshackled brings," Pachisia said.

The angel fund has raised 3-point-5 million dollars from what reads like a Who's Who List of influencers in the tech world.  Pachisia was hired by American partner Manan Mehta, an entrepreneur whose previous startup shut down mainly because his partner was forced to work another full-time job to keep his H-1B Visa.

"A lot of cases of individuals that have buried their idea, that they either created as to graduating from top universities. Or they thought about it while they were working in the industry. You see them be stifled by the fact that you know, I can't go and work on that full time. The burying of that idea really kills the innovation cycle that America promises," Mehta said.

Unshackled is now on the lookout for between 20 to 25 entrepreneurs or teams to invest in - that is pay them full salaries and benefits, get visas, office space and leverage their network of contacts. In return, Unshackled will get between a 3-12 percent equity stake each company.

"We look at this as a better starting point than any other fund possible. Inherently, our talent pool is hungrier, more passionate, and had to go through more hoops to get to this country to be the best of the best, so we anticipate our success metrics to be higher," Mehta said.

The hope is that the fund's infrastructure leads immigrant teams to their seed-round of capital, which would also give them enough power to gain their own visas and green cards and ultimately be unshackled.