Silicon Valley fund hacks US visa regime A new investment fund is bringing Silicon Valley's problem-solving hacker ethos to US immigration law, looking to tackle the problem of potential entrepreneurs who are held back by a visa regime that has long frustrated the technology industry. The fund, named Unshackled and backed by co-founders of Yahoo and Palantir, has raised $3.5m to give early-stage funding to foreigners working in the US who want to quit their job and launch a start-up but cannot because they need an employer to sponsor their visa. Unlike traditional venture funds, which invest capital in exchange for equity, Unshackled will take equity but also hire founders as employees, allowing them to keep their work visas while building their companies. "Every entrepreneur that we're targeting is at a greater advantage because of the hustle that they've had to prove to get to this country and pursue the American dream," said Manan Mehta, Unshackled's co-founder, himself the son of immigrants who moved to the US from India in the 1970s. Current US immigration law has particularly frustrated the Valley, where tech companies say they face a shortage of engineers, and starting salaries for young developers can top $100,000. The US offers far fewer visas for skilled foreign workers, known as H-1Bs, than the number of applications it receives, and few executives are optimistic that the federal government will raise that cap soon. Democratic and Republican leaders have expressed support for creating more H-1B visas, but sharp divisions between the parties on other issues such as unauthorised immigrants have repeatedly prevented reform legislation from passing Congress. For foreigners who win the H-1B lottery, launching a company of their own is tricky as they must remain formally employed to keep the visa. Unshackled proposes to solve that problem by transferring work visas from the entrepreneurs" current employers to Unshackled and then helping them incorporate and build their start-ups. Under current law, foreign founders have taken various routes to stay in the US. One Canadian founder flies in to California monthly to network and meet customers. He says he has been warned by border guards that he is bumping up against the limit of how many days he can spend in the US each year. One San Francisco-based European entrepreneur trying to transfer an existing H-1B visa to his own company has had to show that his board could fire him and that he owns only a minority of the company. He now meets those criteria after his company raised millions of dollars in several funding rounds. Friends of his, also from overseas, he says, have gone through Valley incubators and hired local engineers but have had to return to their home countries to wait for their own visas. Unshackled's funding comes from investors including Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang's fund, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and early-stage venture funds First Round Capital and 500 Startups. For them, says Mr Mehta's co-founder Nitin Pachisia, part of the draw of investing in Unshackled is they can meet new founders early on in their companies" existence and potentially invest directly in the start-ups" subsequent funding rounds.