We're excited to announce that LegalOS has been accepted into Y Combinator's Winter 2026 batch. We're building the AI-native immigration law firm that makes hiring global talent fast, affordable, and stress-free for startup founders.
If you're a founder hiring your first engineer from abroad or sponsoring a key employee's visa, you're about to enter one of the most frustrating experiences in business: U.S. immigration law.
The process is opaque, slow, and absurdly expensive. BigLaw firms charge $12,000–$35,000 per visa petition, take weeks to return your emails, and bury you in back-and-forth over documents you don't understand. Meanwhile, your hire is stuck in limbo, and your startup is burning runway waiting for an answer.
For early-stage founders, this is more than an inconvenience — it's a real threat to your ability to build your team. You found the perfect engineer, the perfect ML researcher, the perfect cofounder. But the immigration process stands between you and actually getting them to work.
And the stakes are high. A single mistake on a petition — a poorly argued qualification, a missing exhibit, an incorrect classification — can result in a denial that derails your hiring plans for months or even permanently.
Most founders don't realize how broken this system is until they're already knee-deep in it.
LegalOS is an AI-native immigration law firm. We combine proprietary AI technology with licensed attorneys to deliver immigration legal services that are faster, cheaper, and more reliable than traditional law firms.
Here's how it works:
The result: founders go from "I need to sponsor someone" to "petition filed" in a fraction of the time and cost of the traditional process.
This one is personal. My father has been an immigration attorney for over 30 years. I grew up watching him navigate the system — winning thousands of cases, but always constrained by the manual, paper-heavy processes that define the industry.
I saw firsthand how much time attorneys spend on repetitive work that doesn't require legal judgment: organizing exhibits, drafting boilerplate language, chasing down documents. And I saw how that inefficiency gets passed on to clients in the form of massive bills and slow timelines.
Y Combinator has produced some of the most important companies in tech — Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, and many more. But what made YC the right fit for LegalOS is more specific than brand prestige.
YC founders are our customers. Every batch, hundreds of startups need to sponsor visas for international cofounders, engineers, and key hires. Immigration is one of the most common operational pain points in the YC ecosystem, and we're here to solve it.
Being in the W26 batch puts us in the room with the founders who need us most, and gives us the partners, network, and momentum to scale what we've built into something much bigger.
We're heads-down building. Our immediate focus is serving the YC W26 batch and proving that AI-native legal services can be both better and cheaper than the status quo. Beyond that, we're expanding our visa coverage, improving our AI agents, and working toward a future where hiring across borders is as simple as hiring across the street.
If you're a founder who needs immigration help — whether it's an O-1 visa for yourself, an H-1B for an engineer, or anything in between — we'd love to talk.