Startups serving immigrants
5/27 update: I just launched a Slack community for people who are interested in startups that serve immigrants! If this is interesting to you, please click here to join. All are welcome!
I wanted to share some research I’ve been conducting about startups serving immigrants in the U.S. In my research, you’ll find: 1) a market map (shown below) of 42 startups serving immigrants across digital health, edtech, fintech, and legal tech; 2) profiles on eight companies; 3) descriptions of all companies included; and 4) resources for immigrants (e.g., venture capital funding, nonprofits) and for other people to learn more about immigrant experiences. I was going to write an essay originally, but then realized a Google Slides deck was actually easier to work on and easier to read, so click here to view the deck.
I’m passionate about this topic, because I come from a family of immigrants. My family has immigrated from China to Taiwan to the United States. I previously wrote about my experiences growing up Taiwanese American in Indiana and shared that many of my childhood friends were also children of immigrants. Their parents are from countries like China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Pakistan, Poland, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Switzerland, Russia, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
In the U.S., we talk about immigrants achieving “the American Dream.” Immigrant success stories abound with people like Elon Musk, Sergey Brin (co-founder of Google), Sammy Sosa, Jerry Yang (co-founder of Yahoo!), Mila Kunis, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, Indra Nooyi (former PepsiCo CEO), and Simu Liu (Shang-Chi).
These stories are incredible and important, but also may overshadow the challenges of being an immigrant (and of course, immigrants will have different experiences depending on their socioeconomic status, country of origin, level of education, etc.).
Being an immigrant is tough — you have to learn a new language, navigate a complicated healthcare system, build up your credit from scratch, undergo bureaucracy and waiting games to become a citizen, etc. And on top of this, immigrant populations have drawn a lot of vitriol and hate in the last few years as seen in a rise of hate crimes, travel bans, and the Trump administration’s actions to curtail immigration.
I strongly admire and want to better understand the great work of startups working to alleviate these hurdles for immigrants. I couldn’t find many lists or much existing research on this topic, so I created my own.
Overall, I’d love for this deck to be a springboard for anyone to learn about interesting companies and the realities of being an immigrant. I hope this prompts you to think about how you can be more empathetic and kind to the immigrants around you like your coworkers, friends, acquaintances, rideshare drivers, neighbors, classmates, professors, etc.
Okay, go look at my deck now thank you :)