Angel Round · $500K · SAFE @ $6M post-money cap

Indeed, but for visas. Built by humans. Already earning.

O1DMatch is the talent-agency layer on top of a decade of immigration practice, a federal-court ruling that reshaped how O-1 cases are evaluated, and a predecessor petitioner business already running at ~$20K/month. The platform makes the matches possible. This round hires the humans who close them.

Invest from $25K → See what we actually do
$500K
Round target
$25K
Minimum check
$6M
Post-money cap
$20K/mo
Active revenue today
The wow factor up front

The same lawyer who pioneered the O-1 agent-petitioner structure has represented:

A decade of immigration practice across world champions, NFL franchises, global combat-sports organizations, IPL legends, and Fortune-listed enterprise — the relationships, the references, and the playbook that make O1DMatch a credible counterparty on day one.

Named champions on the client roster

Canelo Álvarez Tyson Fury Francis Ngannou Suresh Raina Dmitry Bivol Manuel Padilla

Organizations & enterprise

Team Canelo
NBA G League
ONE Championship
Top Rank Boxing
Las Vegas Raiders
Green Bay Packers
LA Chargers
NASCAR
Goldman Sachs
Paramount+
ESPN
Netflix
First Round Mgmt
Mulk Enterprises
T10 Masters Cricket
Insight Global

Federal litigation: First Round Management v. USCIS — landmark P-1 precedent. Sherrod co-authored AILA's 2020 treatise chapter on artist, entertainer, and athlete visas. Full client list available on request under NDA.

The Thesis

Fortune 5000 sponsors are exiting H-1B. Their talent need didn't go away.

The companies that built their engineering, finance, and research teams on H-1B for 20 years are pulling out — not because they don't need foreign talent, but because the math stopped working. Someone has to give them a different door.

📉

H-1B economics broke

Lottery selection rates collapsed below 15%. Per-hire cost crossed $30K when you include legal, premium processing, and the re-filing risk. The ROI for sponsoring three engineers to land one no longer pencils.

🚪

The retreat is already happening

Companies that sponsored 50+ H-1Bs in 2022 are now sponsoring fewer than 5. Internal counsel has been told "we're not doing H-1B this year." Their hiring managers still need the candidates.

🎯

Warm market, not cold

These employers already understand visa value. They've already done sponsor onboarding, vendor registration, and FN1099 paperwork. They're the easiest sales call in immigration — if someone shows up with a real alternative.

O-1 is the alternative they don't know yet

O-1 has no annual cap, no lottery, faster timelines, and proven approval rates for the right candidates. Most HR teams have never used it because no one packaged it as a turnkey replacement for H-1B. That's the opening.

Why investors should believe this team

Federal court precedent. Forty cricketers in three weeks. World champions on retainer.

The angel-round thesis only works because the foundation underneath it is already battle-tested. Three pieces of proof:

🏛️ The founder changed US immigration law through federal litigation

In First Round Management v. USCIS, Sherrod argued and won the landmark P-1 precedent that reshaped how athlete and entertainer petitions are evaluated — and made the agent-petitioner structure legally viable for the kind of multi-talent filings O1DMatch now powers (see the T10 Masters case study below). He also co-authored AILA's 2020 treatise chapter on artist, entertainer, and athlete visas. That's regulatory expertise no competitor can hire for, no MBA can simulate, and no product team can ship without.

🏏 T10 Masters Cricket — 40 international athletes, 3 weeks

When Shaji Ul Mulk of Mulk Enterprises backed the T10 Masters cricket tournament for the United States, the entire viability of the event hinged on landing forty international cricketers on US soil in three weeks. Standard employer-sponsored channels don't move that fast in three months. The O-1 agent-petitioner structure — the same legal architecture Sherrod established through federal litigation — solved it. All forty filings cleared. The tournament happened on schedule.

"Forty cricketers. Three weeks. One tournament window. Anyone who has tried to bring international athletes into the United States on that timeline knows the answer is supposed to be 'no.' Sherrod and the O1DMatch team used an O-1 agent-petitioner structure — the same legal vehicle they pioneered through federal litigation — and we landed every player on time. The tournament happened because the visa team made it happen."

— Ritesh Patel, CEO, T10 Masters Cricket

🥊 Combat sports — where every petition is a championship-level filing

O1DMatch's roster includes the managers behind champions in MMA, boxing, and combat sports — the venues where O-1 filings are scrutinized hardest and decided fastest. The relationships predate the platform, which is why they hold.

"When the visas stop moving, Sherrod is who I call. He's argued — and won — cases at the federal level that move the law for every fighter in this sport. That's the difference between a lawyer and a strategist."

— Malki Kawa, CEO, First Round Management

Prior clients across sport, entertainment, and enterprise

Real prior clients of the founder's immigration practice — not logos on a roadmap.

Team Canelo
NBA G League
ONE Championship
Top Rank Boxing
Las Vegas Raiders
Green Bay Packers
LA Chargers
NASCAR
Goldman Sachs
Insight Global
Paramount+
First Round Mgmt
Mulk Enterprises
T10 Masters Cricket
What makes us defensible

The platform is the moat. The relationships are the network effect.

O1DMatch solved the chicken-and-egg between US employers who don't want visa-sponsorship hassle and foreign talent who need a US opportunity. Once both sides land in the same place, every additional candidate makes the platform more valuable to every employer — and vice versa.

🌉

The platform that bridged the gap

US employers historically avoided foreign talent because visa sponsorship meant cost, paperwork, and risk. We removed all three from their plate. They post a need, we deliver a pre-vetted, visa-ready candidate. The visa machinery happens behind the curtain through our attorney-partner network.

  • Employer never carries the sponsorship burden directly
  • Talent already pre-screened against visa eligibility before introductions
  • Filing handled by our immigration-attorney partner network — not the employer's HR team
🤝

Talent that trusts us, employers that know us

Talent agencies live and die on relationship density. Ours is built across years of one-on-one petition work. That's a roster you can't buy — and a list of references that closes deals.

  • 2,000+ qualified O-1 candidates already in pipeline
  • 15,000+ employer contacts already in our database — every one with prior visa-sponsorship history
  • References from approved petitioners across sport, entertainment, tech, research
  • Inbound referral flow from prior clients (the only marketing that scales)
🏛️

Vendor-registered to sell to enterprise

Most immigration shops are sole proprietorships. We've built the corporate plumbing — IGH UEI, CAGE code, EIN, federal registration — that lets us land in Fortune-5000 vendor systems and process invoices through procurement.

  • SAM.gov registered, federal-ready (IGH parent)
  • Workday/Coupa/Ariba vendor onboarding capability
  • NAICS 561311 — the procurement code enterprise expects
🛠️

Internal tools, not the product

Yes, we built AI tools — petition drafting, exhibit generation, USCIS-officer scoring — that we hand to our attorney partners to make their work 5x faster. They are not our service. Our service is the human picking up the phone when a candidate is confused or an employer wants to move fast.

  • 5 internal tools live in production
  • Used by our attorney partners to reduce per-case prep time by ~60%
  • Resold to clients post-onboarding as upsell, not lead
What our humans actually do

This is a talent agency. Same playbook as WME, just with immigration expertise built in.

You don't sign with a talent agency because they have a database. You sign because someone returns your call, knows your career, and walks you into the room. That's the relationship layer angel money is funding.

For the talent

A senior recruiter, not a chatbot.

  • Personal eligibility consultation, with attorney-partner review built in
  • Career-fit screening — what role, what city, what employer profile
  • Evidence curation and a clean handoff to our attorney partners when match-ready
  • Employer introductions from our enterprise book
  • One point of contact through approval and Day 1 at the new employer

For the employer

A BD lead who knows your hiring map.

  • On-site or video meeting with the hiring manager and HR/legal
  • Vendor registration & MSA — we handle the procurement gauntlet
  • Slate of pre-vetted O-1 candidates matched to current openings
  • O1DMatch / IGH sits as the named agent of record — your team isn't the visa sponsor
  • Hiring-map visibility, status updates, renewal calendar — attorney partners handle the legal work

No part of the relationship is automated away. The platform schedules, tracks, and bills — but the trust is earned by humans.

Automated job matching tier

For talent who don't want to wait — the platform brings the jobs to them

Inside the platform, talent can upgrade to the automated job-matching tier. Instead of waiting for an employer to find them, the system pushes employer interest to the candidate: every new opening that matches their O-1 profile lands in their dashboard with a one-click apply, scored against their criteria, ranked by likelihood of approval.

  • Active push, not passive listing. Candidates get matched the moment a fitting employer posts.
  • Pre-scored against eligibility. Only opportunities the candidate has a real shot at — no spam, no filler.
  • Recurring revenue from talent side. Subscription tier that monetizes the candidate pipeline beyond the placement-fee model.
  • Network effect with employers. The more employer activity, the more value the talent tier delivers — and the more talent stays subscribed.

Try it free — code BONUS100 →

The foreign-contractor cohort — service at half the cost, twice the reach

Not every hire on this round is a US-based FTE. A meaningful slice of the budget trains a cohort of foreign contractors — many of them O-1 alumni or pipeline candidates themselves — to handle client onboarding, document chase-down, candidate-relationship support, and overnight inbox coverage. They're cheaper than US FTEs by 60–70%, they speak the talent's first language, and they extend our human touch into time zones our US team can't cover.

  • Trained, not just hired. Two-week program covers our case-management system, USCIS terminology, brand voice, and confidentiality protocols.
  • Service-side, not legal-side. They never give legal advice. They handle scheduling, document collection, candidate check-ins, and CRM hygiene — the work that frees Sherrod and the BD team to sell and file.
  • Pipeline benefit. Top performers become candidates themselves — we've already helped trained contractors get their own O-1 petitions completed through our attorney partners.
See it work

Six videos. The full loop.

Real product flows on the live platform. From a candidate getting scored in two minutes to an employer sending a USCIS-formatted interest letter — every critical step, captured on video.

Candidate sign-up and scoring flow
▶

Sign up + get scored in 2 minutes

A candidate creates an account and gets scored against the 8 USCIS O-1 criteria. Free, in under 2 minutes. 60% of scored candidates find out they qualify.

Talent~2 min
Evidence classifier in talent dashboard
▶

Upload evidence → auto-classified

Drop a document. The platform extracts text, classifies it against the 8 O-1 criteria, and flags the strongest evidence. Multi-criterion tagging supported.

Talent~2 min
Talent accepting and signing a letter
▶

Talent accepts + signs digitally

The candidate reviews the employer interest letter, accepts, and signs digitally via SignWell. The signed PDF becomes part of their O-1 petition package.

Talent~1 min
Employer browsing talent
▶

Employer browses + sends interest

An employer filters the anonymized candidate pool by skill and score, then sends a one-page USCIS-formatted interest letter. No visa-sponsorship burden. No compliance exposure.

Employer~2 min
PIN-based zero-login letter retrieval
▶

Zero-login letter retrieval by PIN

Users email letters@letters.o1dmatch.com with their PIN + email in the subject line and receive every letter back as PDFs in under a minute. Email-native UX no competitor has.

Both sides~1 min
🎟️

Or try it yourself — free

Skip the videos. Create a free account at app.o1dmatch.com and use code BONUS100 at signup. You'll get full talent-side access including the AI eligibility scorer, evidence classifier, and the automated job-matching dashboard.

Live platformFree with BONUS100
How we make money

Five revenue streams. Three are already live.

This isn't a "raise to discover revenue" round. The predecessor petitioner brand has been running at roughly $20K/month on the exact services we're now routing into O1DMatch. The angel round funds the team that scales the funnel.

CANDIDATE — Self-Serve

$100/mo

Passive Match

The free tier shows you if you qualify. Passive Match unlocks the matching engine: continuous employer matching, weekly score refresh, evidence classifier, letter retrieval.

See what's included →
CANDIDATE — Concierge

$500/mo

Active Match · Human-Touch

Everything in Passive Match plus a real human: dedicated recruiter, profile we build for you, off-platform employer outreach, interest letters drafted and negotiated by a person — not a button.

See what's included →
EMPLOYER — Retainer

$2,000/mo

Active Petitioner

We become your agent of record on the petition. Dedicated account manager. Active candidate sourcing against your profile. Placement fee on the back end. Attorney partners do the legal work — your team never touches a USCIS form.

See what's included →

Plus the layers that scale with every placement

💼 Placement fees

~$31K avg · 20% of an avg $155K O-1-eligible salary. Charged when an employer hires through O1DMatch.

🛠️ Tool resale

USCIS Officer Scorer, Petition Generator, Exhibit Maker, VisaClear, AI Visa Evaluation — sold to onboarded clients as upsell.

📑 Petitioner service revenue (existing)

~$20K/mo running today through the predecessor petitioner brand. The funnel is being switched to O1DMatch as the brand of record — same service, new front door.

🤝 Attorney directory + affiliate

50+ attorneys onboarded. 20% commission on referred subscribers — a passive employer-side and candidate-side acquisition lever.

15,000
Employer Contacts
Already in our database — every one with prior visa-sponsorship history
2,000
Pre-Vetted Candidates
O-1-eligible talent already vetted by our team and attorney partners
$31K
Avg Placement Fee
20% of $155K avg O-1-eligible salary

Pipeline is the multiplier on the subscription base, not a substitute for it. The Fortune 5000 + ex-H-1B sponsor list is the warmest list in immigration — they're already sold on visa value, already have procurement plumbing, and their hiring managers still need the talent that H-1B used to deliver.

Where your $25K goes

Hiring humans. That's the entire allocation.

This round funds people who carry quotas, run accounts, and shake hands. No infrastructure spend, no marketing budget, no AI training cost — those are already paid for.

Head of Talent (FT, 18 mo)
$135K
Senior recruiter who owns the talent-side relationships. Builds the bench of pre-vetted O-1 candidates and runs the talent-side service motion.
2× BD / Employer Sales (FT, 12 mo + commission)
$150K
Build the employer book. Target the ex-H-1B sponsor list. Close the MSAs. Quota-carrying with commission upside.
Vendor-Registration Specialist (contractor, 12 mo)
$60K
Owns the Workday / Coupa / Ariba onboarding for every Fortune-5000 target. The unsexy work that turns one MSA into 50 placements.
Foreign-Contractor Training Cohort (NEW)
$25K
Two-week training program + initial monthly stipend for 4–6 trained foreign contractors who handle client-success, document collection, and candidate check-ins. The service layer at 60–70% lower cost than US FTEs, with deeper reach into the talent's first language.
Client Success Lead (PT contractor, 12 mo)
$30K
Manages the foreign-contractor cohort and owns the candidate-experience score. Service quality leader so the BD team isn't pulled into delivery.
Operations / Founder support (PT, 18 mo)
$40K
Frees Sherrod from admin so he stays in front of clients and on petitions. Calendar, scheduling, contracts, vendor portal updates.
CRM, contracts, tooling
$25K
HubSpot or Salesforce, e-signature, vendor management. The minimum infrastructure to run a sales org.
Travel + employer site visits
$20K
In-person meetings with hiring managers and HR. The "human touch" that closes enterprise deals — and the entire reason this round exists.
Legal, SAFE admin, contingency
$15K
SAFE issuance, employment agreements, and a working reserve. Light because we have legal in-house.
Total — 86% on humans
$500K
$430K of $500K goes to people: 3 FT US hires, 1 PT lead, 1 vendor-reg specialist, 4–6 trained foreign contractors, plus founder support. 100% deployed within 18 months.
What we deliver

18 months of people-driven milestones.

Month 0–3

Hire and ramp

  • Head of Talent + 2 BD reps + Client Success Lead onboarded
  • First foreign-contractor cohort (4–6) trained and live
  • CRM stood up; ex-H-1B sponsor list loaded
  • First 50 employer outreach contacts made
Month 4–6

First MSAs and placements

  • 3+ Fortune-5000 vendor registrations completed
  • 1–2 enterprise MSAs signed
  • First O-1 placements closed under angel-round-funded BD (filing handled by attorney partners)
Month 7–12

Revenue ramp

  • 10+ MSAs signed across target accounts
  • 30+ placements closed; revenue run-rate ≥ $1M ARR
  • Talent bench grown from 2,000 to 3,500+ pre-vetted candidates active
Month 13–18

Series A readiness

  • $2M+ ARR with positive contribution margin
  • Repeatable BD playbook documented
  • Series A raise opens — angel SAFE converts at cap or round price
For investors who want the technical depth

The tools we built for ourselves.

We're a services business. The AI exists to make our team faster, not to replace them. After a client signs, we resell access to the same tools — that's the upsell layer, not the product.

🧠

USCIS Officer Scorer

Scores each petition the way a USCIS adjudicator would. Used by our attorney partners before they file, so weak cases get flagged before USCIS sees them.

📄

Petition Generator

Drafts O-1, P-1, EB-1A petitions from candidate intake. Attorney partners still review every filing. Speed: 6–8 hours of case-prep time saved per petition.

📚

Exhibit Maker

URL-to-PDF exhibit generator. Used for Kazarian evidence assembly. Reduces paralegal hours per case from ~12 to ~3.

🔍

VisaClear Social Scan

Pre-filing background check on candidates' public profiles. De-risks petitions before USCIS sees them.

⚖️

AI Visa Evaluation

Quick eligibility screen on intake. Filters the calendar so our team spends hours only with viable candidates worth handing off to an attorney partner.

🔁

Resale layer

Once a client is onboarded, the tools get repackaged as self-serve products at our app.o1dmatch.com. Margin enhancement, not the entry point.

If you want the AI investment thesis, that's the Series A deck at invest.o1dmatch.com. This round is buying the people who make those tools matter.

Who you're investing in

Sherrod first. Team next. Everyone accountable.

Angel investors fund people. So this section leads with the people, not the platform.

Sherrod D. Seward, Esq. — Founder & CEO

Immigration attorney · Federal litigator · Founder of the IGH ecosystem

Immigration attorney and founder. Won First Round Management v. USCIS, the landmark P-1 precedent that established the legal viability of the agent-petitioner structure. Co-author of AILA's 2020 treatise chapter on artist, entertainer, and athlete visas. Secured visas for world-champion athletes including Canelo Álvarez, Tyson Fury, Francis Ngannou, Suresh Raina, Dmitry Bivol, and Manuel Padilla, plus enterprise and franchise clients spanning Las Vegas Raiders, Green Bay Packers, LA Chargers, NASCAR, ONE Championship, Top Rank Boxing, NBA G League, Goldman Sachs, ESPN, Netflix, and Paramount+. Operates a 7-brand family of immigration services — O1DMatch, IGTA, Aventus, SSV, Camino, DC Federal, and Pentos — all plugging into the same platform.

  • Federal litigation: argued and won First Round Management v. USCIS — the precedent that powers enterprise filings like the T10 Masters Cricket 40-athlete agent-petitioner build
  • Published thought leadership: AILA 2020 Treatise co-author on artist, entertainer, and athlete visas
  • Built the multi-entity organization from solo founder to seven-brand platform operator
  • Owns employer-relationship strategy and the attorney-partner network
  • Sets the bar for who makes it onto the candidate pipeline

Gabriella — Client Operations Lead

Primary client point of contact. Owns the client experience from intake through Day 1 at the new employer. Coordinates with our attorney partners on case progress so clients never get lost between us and them.

Tiffany Moore — Law Clerk & Corporate Outreach

Coordinates corporate-side relationships and partner outreach. Bridges talent and employer pipelines.

Autumn Marshall — Marketing & Investor Relations

Owns the investor pipeline and marketing communications. The voice for the round and the messenger to the cap table.

Ankit Giri — Operations Lead

Runs day-to-day operations. Tracks every active match, every open interest letter, and every milestone on the way to placement — so the team and our attorney partners are always working off the same status.

Arun — Lead Developer

Owns the platform and the internal-tools stack. Ships features, maintains the case-management system, and keeps the AI tools running so the human team is force-multiplied, not gated.

Yusuf — Developer

Builds and maintains the candidate- and employer-facing apps. Handles integrations, deployments, and the data plumbing that lets recruiters, BD, and case ops work in the same system.

Counsel & advisors

The people around the cap table.

The specialists who structure the round, advise the fundraise, and bridge the academic pipeline to the talent side of the platform.

Kenneth Johnson, CFA — Investment & Finance Advisor

Financial strategy, investment structuring, and capital-markets advisory. Original investor in Sherrod's prior ventures. Guides fundraising strategy, investor relations, and cap-table architecture across the angel and Series A rounds.

Jeffrey Nerdin — Securities Counsel

Securities and business attorney with 17+ years of practice. Former General Counsel at Valkor Energy and former counsel at the XPRIZE Foundation. Owns investment structure, corporate governance, IP strategy, and Reg D 506(c) fundraising compliance for the round.

Rollin Seward — University Liaison

Builds the academic pipeline into O1DMatch — connecting US universities, F-1 OPT/CPT programs, and graduate-program alumni networks to the candidate side of the platform. Longtime partner across the IGH ecosystem and Corporate Partnership Director at IGTA.

Hires from this round (Head of Talent, BD reps, vendor-reg specialist) plug into this team — they don't replace it.

The structure

Standard SAFE. Post-money cap. No drama.

We're using YC's post-money SAFE template. It's the cleanest paper for an angel round and the easiest to administer. Every angel gets the same terms.

Instrument
YC Post-Money SAFE
Industry-standard. No interest, no maturity date, no board seat.
Valuation cap
$6,000,000 post-money
Your SAFE converts at the lower of the cap or the next round's price.
Discount
None
Cap-only structure. Cleaner cap table at Series A.
Round target
$500,000
20 SAFEs at $25K min. Round closes when committed or in 90 days, whichever first.
Minimum check
$25,000
Lower than typical institutional, higher than F&F. Right size for angels who want exposure without leading.
Conversion trigger
Series A or liquidity
SAFE converts to preferred equity at the next priced round, or pays out at acquisition.

What does $25K turn into?

At $6M post-money cap. Move the slider to model your check.

Your investment
$25,000
Ownership at cap
0.42%
Implied value at $20M Series A
$83,333
Implied value at $40M Series A
$166,667

Illustrative only. Actual conversion math depends on Series A size, option pool refresh, and any SAFE/note stack adjustments. Not a securities offer.

What could go wrong

Honest risk disclosure.

Services businesses fail differently than SaaS. Here are the four ways this round could miss, and what we're doing about each.

Hiring risk

The threat: The Head of Talent or BD hires don't perform. The whole thesis is people, so a bad hire is a bigger problem than for a tech-first company.

The mitigation: 90-day review cadence. Commission-heavy comp on the BD side so cost scales with output. Replacement budget held in reserve in the contingency line.

Sales-cycle risk

The threat: Fortune-5000 vendor onboarding takes 4–9 months. The first dollar of placement revenue from a given employer can be a year out.

The mitigation: Pipeline runs in parallel — 50+ employer conversations open at any time. Talent-side subscription revenue (existing) covers operating cost while enterprise pipeline matures.

Regulatory risk

The threat: USCIS adjudication standards tighten. RFE rates climb. Approval rates compress.

The mitigation: Internal scoring tool flags weak petitions before filing. We turn down candidates that don't meet the bar. Better to lose a fee than carry a denial.

Concentration risk

The threat: First few enterprise MSAs may produce the bulk of early revenue. Losing one would hurt.

The mitigation: Diversify employer book to 10+ MSAs by Month 12. No single account > 30% of placement revenue by Month 18.

Submit interest

Want in?

Drop your details below. We'll send the SAFE template, the data room link, and a 30-minute call slot with Sherrod within 48 hours.

By submitting, you confirm you're acting on your own behalf for a personal accredited-investor evaluation. No securities are being offered until SAFE documents are countersigned.

Or skip the form.

Email sherrod@sherrodsportsvisas.com directly. He reads every angel-round inbound personally and replies within one business day.