Seattle startup Casium, which uses artificial intelligence to streamline the work visa application process, raised $5 million in seed funding.

The round was led by San Francisco-based Maverick Ventures, with participation from Seattle’s AI2 Incubator, GTMfund, Success Venture Partners, and Jake Heller, co-founder of Casetext, now part of Thomson Reuters.

Casium, spun out of AI2 Incubator in April 2024, is led by founder and CEO Priyanka Kulkarni, a former Microsoft scientist and entrepreneur-in-residence at AI2 Incubator who wanted to fix a problem that she herself experienced while applying for an EB-1 visa.

“Casium started from frustration, from my own experience with a process that was confusing, opaque, and full of endless back and forth,” Kulkarni wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “What began as a personal pain point became a mission to build something better. Today, that mission has grown into a solution helping global talent and the companies that hire them move forward faster with transparency and expert-led precision at every step.”

Applying for work visas requires applicants and employers to make their case to the U.S. government for why the individual is deserving of the opportunity, citing education, work experience and other factors.

The process and paperwork can be time-consuming even with the help of an outside law firm, and Kulkarni’s goal was to shrink the timeline from months down to days.

The Casium platform uses algorithms to first assess the best route for an applicant, which could be a temporary work visa or seeking permanent residency. The startup uses AI to autonomously gather information for an application and prepare the document. Casium works with immigration attorneys to guide the process and represent the visa applicants.

Casium offers initial assessments for free and charges a flat fee for filings based on visa type and case complexity, Business Insider reported. Kulkarni said the company is also developing a subscription model to give employers more options for ongoing support.

The startup, which employs nine people, says it is already working with employers from early stage startups to Series F companies and has assisted hundreds of candidates through visa assessments, compliance reviews, and actual filings, and maintains what it calls “an exceptionally high approval rate.”

“Every filing and every approval is a reminder of why this work matters,” Kulkarni said in calling out Casium’s customers on LinkedIn.

The spotlight on work visas ratcheted up last month when President Donald Trump announced an executive order outlining a $100,000 fee for H-1B visas, which allow companies to hire highly skilled foreign workers in “specialty occupations” such as software engineering, data science, and other STEM fields.

Casium said more than 442,000 workers compete for just 85,000 H-1B visa slots annually. The high-stakes process underscores the company’s potential appeal.

Other companies are working to improve the legal immigration experience — including fellow Seattle startup Boundless Immigration, which spun out of Pioneer Square Labs in 2017 and helps immigrants connect with lawyers and file applications for spousal visas and U.S. citizenship. Boundless has raised more than $43 million and is one of the largest consumer-focused family immigration companies.

Previously: ‘I really want to fix this’: Microsoft vet launches Seattle startup to transform work visa applications

AI voice startup WellSaid Labs is doubling down on its niche of enterprise customers and regulated industries — hoping that a more judicious, behind-the-scenes approach will pay off for its business in the long run even as flashier rivals draw widespread attention and controversy.

The company, based in Bellevue, Wash., launched a new version of its text-to-speech AI voice platform Monday with redesigned Studio software and its next-generation Caruso voice model, promising better workflows, improved audio quality, and fine-tuned controls, among other features.

Unlike open voice-generation models that scrape public data, WellSaid’s system is trained exclusively on licensed voice actor recordings, a closed-model approach that it says respects intellectual property and appeals to sectors such as healthcare, legal, and finance. 

WellSaid’s latest release is a pivotal moment for the company — the result of years of internal research now coming to market in a form that refines its focus on business and institutional users, said Chris Johnson, WellSaid’s chief product and technology officer, in an interview.

“We put our stake in the ground in being the best solution for enterprises in the market,” Johnson said. “A lot of these innovations accrue to making that a reality for us.”

WellSaid, which spun out of Seattle’s AI2 Incubator in 2019, works with large enterprise customers including LinkedIn, T-Mobile, ServiceNow, and Accenture.

The company made an impression on the public in 2023 when NPR’s Planet Money used WellSaid’s technology to create a synthetic version of former host Robert Smith’s voice — a near-perfect replica that surprised listeners and showed both the promise and potential challenges of realistic AI audio.

But WellSaid has struggled at times to break into the larger industry conversation. The challenge was underscored by its absence from a CB Insights market map of leading voice-AI startups — topped by buzzy ElevenLabs, which has been at the center of controversy over the use of its technology to make fake AI voices of public figures and others.

WellSaid executives say they’re hoping to correct that specific oversight, but the challenge reflects a broader pattern among enterprise AI companies, particularly those in the Seattle region — which often emphasize trust, governance, and regulatory scenarios in a tech culture still captivated by headline-generating Silicon Valley experiments and consumer apps.

A spokesperson said enterprise customers are WellSaid’s fastest-growing segment, expanding six-fold in three years with net retention of more than 150%. Its business model is lean, having raised about $20 million, letting it run efficiently while paying voice actors royalties and offering an equity program. The company employs about 70 people, down slightly from a year ago, according to LinkedIn data.

WellSaid says it’s seeing new momentum in the application of its AI technology to advertising, due to an increase in voice quality and a decrease in related content production costs.

The company has seen some turnover in its executive suite, including three CEOs in less than two years — starting with founder Matt Hocking (who is still chairman), then Brian Cook, and now Benjamin Dorr, who succeeded Cook earlier this year after serving as chief financial officer. 

“Every voice is connected to a real person, and that person receives royalties from the revenue that’s generated on WellSaid,” Dorr said on a recent episode of the Master Move podcast. “I think the things we do right by our voice actors allow us to do right by the enterprises that choose us, and I don’t think everyone else can say that.”