This Year at Unshackled
What We Have Learned
At Unshackled, we’ve always started from a simple conviction. If immigrant founders had the freedom to build from day zero, they would create a different kind of company and a different kind of economy. Eleven years in, that’s no longer just a belief; it’s actual proof. In 2025, a few experiments further confirmed that.
The more important story isn’t that these things happened but rather what they taught us. This is what we want to share with you today.
Being the First Believer Matters
This year reminded us what it means to be truly early:
We wrote checks into companies at post-money valuations ranging from $1.5M to $ 7.5M that went on to raise next rounds at $10M, $35M, $40M, $55M, and beyond.
We saw 100% of 2025 pre-seed companies go on to raise follow-on capital.
The work that moves fundraising forward isn’t just introductions; it’s storytelling. It’s the long conversations about how a founder explains the problem, what they want the next phase to look like, and how to express a vision without inflating or shrinking it. Many key moments in fundraising happened during these conversations.
For immigrant founders, one aligned early investor who understands their constraints and their mission can shift the entire round. Not only because of signaling power, but also because someone helps them articulate what they already know and haven’t yet said out loud.
As our founding partner, Manan often tells founders:
“This may sit below the Carta averages for pre-seed valuations, but it’s what lets us say yes now—as your friends-and-family check—rather than after you’ve de-risked the business. It creates psychological freedom to lean into possibility, even when most of the unknowns lie ahead.”
On our side, the lesson was clear: you can’t claim to be an early-stage fund and wait for consensus or signal. If you want to participate at the point where your conviction creates value, you have to develop that conviction before the market does and be willing to price what you don’t know.
Optionality Only Matters if You Use It
We also had the opportunity to turn a 52x outcome into real liquidity. This was our third 50x+ mark, but it was the first time we made a deliberate decision to turn it into real DPI while keeping most of the upside. Venture firms talk a lot about ownership and optionality, but those ideas only become meaningful when you’re willing to exercise them thoughtfully.
For us, this was an opportunity to balance responsibility to our LPs while holding our belief in the founder and the long-term arc of the company. The transaction allowed us to return capital, maintain alignment with the team, and hold onto most of the upside.
This experience reinforced that early ownership and disciplined pricing give you the choice to be a strong partner to our founders and our LPs. Still, those choices only help if you engage with them intentionally. There is a middle ground between never selling and selling too early, and it takes objectivity and frameworks to operate there.
People Will Show Up if the Space is Designed With Intention
U-Labs began with a fundamental question: did technical immigrants have a place to gather before they considered themselves founders? The first sessions were virtual, lots of 1:1s, and requests to be included. This experiment made it clear that we needed an in-person format.
What surprised us wasn’t only the demand from emerging founders, but the generosity from people further along the journey. Busy unicorn founders, attorneys, and executives said yes to showing up and sharing openly, often without knowing anyone in the room. When you create a space that feels specific to the immigrant experience, to early technical work, to real constraints, people recognize themselves in it and want to contribute.
And when we stepped onto university campuses with sessions like “How to start a company on a visa,” the same thing happened. International students who had never seen a path forward suddenly had one.
The broader lesson for us was that universities and the immigrant community remain an undervalued way to reach technical talent early. Many of the strongest future founders are not at accelerators or demo days but in labs, living in uncertainty about visas or employment. Meeting them there is both more human and more effective.
A Mission That Holds Even as the Firm Changes
Internally, this was a year of growth. We clarified the next chapter of Unshackled, brought new leaders into more central roles, welcomed Eric Ries as a partner focused on helping founders build companies that stay true to their mission, and optimized responsibilities to reflect how the firm actually operates today.
What we saw this year is that trust grows when people move transparently, at a pace everyone can absorb, and with a shared understanding of why the changes are happening. Moving at the speed of trust doesn’t slow you down; it keeps the team aligned enough to accelerate when it matters.
What kept things thriving wasn’t the structure itself, but the clarity behind it: showing up for founders, helping them navigate hard decisions, and staying anchored to the belief that outlier immigrant founders are worth finding early and supporting deeply. When that purpose is intact, evolution inside the firm doesn’t erode trust; it reinforces it.
The key lesson for us and one that applies far beyond venture is that clarity and trust travel together. When people understand the “why” and feel included in the direction of travel, transitions stop feeling like disruptions and start becoming moments that strengthen alignment. For founders, the parallel is direct: teams don’t need perfect stability, but they do need to know what isn’t changing. That is what makes real momentum possible.
What We’re Taking With Us
2025 clarified a few things we want to carry forward.
Supporting immigrant founders requires spaces where they feel understood, not just funded.
Early conviction still shapes outcomes more than anything else.
Optionality means little unless you’re thoughtful about how to use it.
And when you design the right rooms, people will show up and help.
To every founder, student, operator, and partner who trusted us this year: thank you. The work is far from finished, but the path forward feels clearer than it did twelve months ago, and that clarity came from the people who walked it with us.
Unshackled Ventures - Immigrants Start Here
About Unshackled Ventures: Unshackled Ventures is the only early-stage venture capital fund that enables unrecognized and excluded immigrant founders to start companies in the U.S. Since its founding in 2014, Unshackled has proven its thesis that investing and supporting this population drives strong investment returns across key industries, including American infrastructure, generative AI, healthcare, space, and enterprise SaaS. To date, the firm has invested in over 100 companies and over 250 entrepreneurs.
Love this quote: “This may sit below the Carta averages for pre-seed valuations, but it’s what lets us say yes now—as your friends-and-family check—rather than after you’ve de-risked the business. It creates psychological freedom to lean into possibility, even when most of the unknowns lie ahead.” Leaning into expanding the friend and family round is so important for founders who have amazing ideas and determination but just don’t have the generational financial wealth. We have seen the world created by prioritizing who has access to money and it is clear that we can do better. Let me know the next time y’all are raising. 😀
"Immigrants Start Here" - I love it. I was fortunate to take one of my accelerator cohorts from SJSU up to your space in San Francisco where you shared your vision and mission. Mostly immigrant founders, they were blown away at the experience. Seeing a VC committed to immigrant founders gave them a new perspective on being true to themselves and their background.