Unshackled Ventures

Unshackled becomes the employer of record for founders, sponsoring their work visas — typically H-1B transfers or O-1 visas for extraordinary ability — and eventually supporting green card applications. This allows founders to legally build their companies in the U.S. while Unshackled covers the legal and administrative costs. The firm takes on the full liability and operational burden of employment compliance, which is why few other venture firms have replicated the model at scale.

Founding General Partners Manan Mehta and Nitin Pachisia make all investment decisions. The firm operates with a lean partnership structure and has not announced any additional investment partners as of 2025. Mehta previously worked in venture and product roles, while Pachisia brought experience from the startup operating side — a combination that informed the firm's dual focus on capital and operational support for immigrant founders.

The firm focuses exclusively on pre-seed and seed rounds, typically writing first checks between $300,000 and $750,000. Unshackled reserves capital for follow-on investments in subsequent rounds but does not lead Series A or later-stage deals. The strategy is built around being the first institutional investor in immigrant-founded companies, often before traditional seed funds are willing to engage.

Yes, the firm's core thesis requires that at least one founding team member is an immigrant to the United States who faces visa-related barriers to starting a company. This constraint is not a programmatic carve-out but the structural foundation of the entire fund — the firm's operational platform exists specifically to solve the employment and immigration problems that citizen founders do not face.

The firm draws founders from university research labs, PhD programs, and international founder communities where visa constraints are most acute. Because Unshackled is one of the few venture firms capable of sponsoring employment, it often sees deals from founders who have been rejected by other early-stage funds due to their immigration status. The pipeline is heavily referral-driven from immigrant entrepreneur networks and university entrepreneurship centers.

Unshackled frequently co-invests alongside other seed funds and angels, particularly when the immigration sponsorship component de-risks the founder's ability to remain in the U.S. for the duration of company building. The firm does not operate a syndicate or club model but has co-invested with firms including General Catalyst and Y Combinator-aligned funds on deals where Unshackled's employment infrastructure was a prerequisite for the founding team.

Unshackled raised a $25 million Fund II in 2019 and a $35 million Fund III in 2023, per regulatory filings. The modest fund sizes relative to generalist seed funds reflect the operational intensity of the model — the firm is not designed to scale to hundreds of portfolio companies because each investment requires ongoing employment compliance work. Fund size growth has been incremental and appears deliberately constrained to match the partnership's capacity.