Last Week in Immigration, Venture & Entrepreneurship — Week of July 27, 2026

The most consequential moves in American enterprise keep coming from founders who arrived with a visa and a problem they understood better than anyone born here. Last week brought two major funding announcements in AI infrastructure and supply chain automation, a court block on a $100K H-1B fee that stayed in force, and a new White House proposal that could reshape the founder pipeline more than anything we have tracked this year. Here is what mattered: who got funded, and the rules shaping it all.

The past week was about watching two things happen at once — and sitting with the tension between them.

On one side: the rounds keep coming. Immigrant-founded companies continued raising serious capital last week, across AI infrastructure, enterprise software, and deep tech. The market has not stopped rewarding founders who came here for the opportunity and built into the whitespace.

On the other side: the OPT proposal dropped. The White House confirmed it is considering a $100,000 fee on Optional Practical Training — the post-graduation work authorization program that roughly 419,000 international students rely on each year to enter the U.S. workforce. I have been tracking immigration policy closely for years. This one lands differently, because OPT is not a marginal pathway. It is the most common bridge between international student and immigrant founder. It is where the pipeline begins.

What I keep coming back to is a pattern I have written about before: policy headwinds and founder output do not move in the same direction. The H-1B fee got blocked by a federal appeals court. The pipeline still contracted 38%. And yet the founders who pushed through anyway — the ones who found alternate routes, stayed creative, kept building — are the ones we are backing. The compression does not stop compounding. It concentrates it.

That is the version of this story that is worth telling.

On the podcast side, Episode 4 of Believe in Aliens is out — a conversation with Arpit Dwivedi of Cache Energy on building energy storage infrastructure from the ground up. The episode has been resonating; worth a listen if you have not heard it yet: Believe in Aliens, Ep. 4 — Arpit Dwivedi, Cache Energy.

— Manan

Two marquee rounds closed last week in AI infrastructure and enterprise automation — both led by immigrant founders, both at or above the $1 billion mark.

• Eliyan raised $145 million in a Series C at a $1 billion valuation, reaching unicorn status on July 29. Founded by Ramin Farjadrad — a serial semiconductor entrepreneur who studied at Sharif University of Technology in Tehran before earning his PhD at Stanford, and who previously co-founded Aquantia (acquired by Marvell) and helped develop multiple IEEE Ethernet standards — Eliyan is building the interconnect architecture that links AI compute, memory, and networking at the chip level. As AI data centers scale toward increasingly heterogeneous GPU clusters, the die-to-die connectivity problem Eliyan is solving becomes structurally more valuable with every new model generation. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with new strategic investors Cisco Investments and Lumentum joining the cap table. (AP News / GlobeNewswire, July 29 | Verdict, July 30)

• Freehand raised $75 million in a Series B, announced July 29, to scale autonomous AI agents managing supply chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises. Co-founded by Nitin Jayakrishnan — an India-origin entrepreneur who previously built and sold Pando, a logistics SaaS platform serving large enterprises globally, from a base that spans San Francisco and Chennai — and co-founder Abhijeet Manohar, Freehand deploys AI agents that negotiate supplier rates, enforce contracts, process invoices, and reconcile data directly inside enterprise systems. Clients include Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer. The round was co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Nexus Venture Partners and PSP Growth (former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker's fund). Freehand has now raised $100 million total. (Crunchbase News, July 29 | The Next Web, July 29)

The throughline: both founders saw something deeply structural — a bottleneck in how AI systems connect at the hardware layer, a bottleneck in how large enterprises manage operational spend — and built into it. The pattern holds across sectors. An outsider builds into a problem that insiders have normalized. The output keeps compounding.

See a growth round we missed? If an immigrant-founded company closed a growth round and it's not here, hit reply and tell us - we'll feature it next week.

A high-signal week on the policy front — the biggest new development in the immigrant-founder pipeline in months, a rapidly expanding enforcement posture at airports, and a Senate bill targeting the green card sponsorship process.

The White House is considering a $100,000 fee on OPT. The Wall Street Journal reported on July 30 — confirmed by Bloomberg — that the Trump administration is actively weighing a $100,000 fee on Optional Practical Training, the post-graduation work authorization program used by roughly 419,000 international students each year. No formal rule has been issued; DHS confirmed the proposal is under evaluation and did not deny active consideration. The legal path being explored targets OPT as a work authorization rather than a visa category, testing a new route after the First Circuit blocked the equivalent H-1B fee. If enacted, the fee would all but eliminate OPT as a founder pathway. For most immigrant founders who built their early careers in the U.S. on an F-1 student visa, OPT was the bridge. A bipartisan House bill (Liccardo/Obernolte) to codify OPT into statute remains in committee and becomes more relevant if the fee proposal advances. What to watch: a formal NPRM or executive action announcement in the coming weeks; any First Circuit-style legal challenge if the fee is imposed. (Wall Street Journal / TechTimes, July 30 | Bloomberg, July 30)

ICE is now arresting H-1B and pending-status immigrants at domestic airports. Beginning in late July, ICE expanded a data-sharing arrangement with TSA to target travelers whose Form I-94 has expired — including H-1B workers with timely-filed extensions, individuals with pending green card applications, and advance parole holders. At least 27 arrests have been documented across 15 or more airports. Multiple major law firms issued urgent client alerts on July 30-31; Mayer Brown and Greenberg Traurig advised all employers to verify employee I-94 status before any domestic or international travel. Founders and employees who have pending AOS applications but have allowed their underlying nonimmigrant status to lapse are at elevated risk. The practical guidance: confirm your I-94 is current, maintain underlying H-1B or O-1 status even while an adjustment of status is pending, and consult immigration counsel before any travel. (New York Times, July 28 | Mayer Brown, July 30 | Mondaq / Greenberg Traurig, July 31)

$100K H-1B fee stays blocked. For now, the good news holds. The First Circuit's July 24 ruling denying the government's emergency stay request remains in effect — no H-1B surcharge is enforceable while the appeal continues. The D.C. Circuit case (Chamber of Commerce v. DHS) is still pending; Supreme Court review remains a realistic next step. No change in status through August 2. (Bloomberg Law, July 24)

Rick Scott's $10K PERM fee bill introduced. Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) introduced the American Hiring Transparency Act on July 29, which would impose a $10,000 fee on every PERM labor certification application — the mandatory first step in most employer-sponsored green card cases. The bill was referred to committee with no co-sponsors. Near-term probability of passage is low, but it signals continued Senate appetite for adding cost friction to employer-sponsored immigration. For early-stage founders sponsoring key hires for permanent residence, this is a number to know. (Rick Scott press release, July 29)

We navigate these conditions as they are — not as we would prefer them to be. The model is built to work across administrations, and a tightening environment only sharpens the case for founders who pair capital with immigration expertise from the start.

What to watch: Formal DHS action on the OPT fee proposal; any legal challenge that mirrors the H-1B fee litigation; the D.C. Circuit ruling on the Chamber of Commerce H-1B case.

Did we miss something - or do you see it differently? If there's a development we should be tracking, or you've got a read from the ground, hit reply. We read every note, and we want this section to reflect what founders are actually living, not just what's in the Federal Register.

That is the week. The entry points keep narrowing. The output keeps compounding. The people pushing through anyway are exactly the ones worth backing first — they always have been.