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The company, which is based in Indonesia, provides a wide range of services, from rides to payments to food delivery.

Gojek’s investors include , and . The company first raised money with its $2 million in December 2014, and has more than in funding, according to Crunchbase.

The financing deal was finalized over the past week, Bloomberg reported. It’s an impressive sum that comes as the world economy feels the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. stock market, for example, has sunk and investors have suggested that there will be a slowdown in venture capital funding.

“We’re not stopping there as we are still seeing strong demand among the investment community to partner with us,” co-CEOs Andre Soelistyo and Kevin Aluwi wrote in an internal memo to employees, which was obtained by Bloomberg. “There are a number of exciting ongoing conversations that we will be able to update you on very soon.”

Gojek competes perhaps most notably with Singapore’s , another ride-hailing giant that’s trying to be the “everything in one” app with rides, payments, food delivery and other services. Grab–which has nearly $10 billion in funding, according to Crunchbase–and Gojek were reportedly in talks about a merger, though Gojek denied it, according to Bloomberg.

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The company, which was founded in 2015, is something like a new-age bank: Users can create accounts in the Revolut app and deposit and send money with it. 

Revolut wants to bring in 100 million customers in the next five years and expand outside of Europe, CEO told TV on Tuesday.

The new round brings Revolut’s total funding to about , according to Crunchbase. Its last valuation was $1.5 billion, but with its new $5.5 billion price tag, it’s tied with Swedish payment installment startup for the title of Europe’s most valuable fintech startup, according to .

led the new round, and the company is also backed by investors like , and. It last raised a $250 million Series C, led by DST Global, in April 2018. 

Fintech startups are certainly hot right now–they’re getting plenty of funding and a couple have seen high profile exits. announced plans to acquire for $5.3 billion last month, and just yesterday confirmed rumors that it would be acquired by for $7.1 billion.

Revolut has more than 10 million customers and has processed more than 350 million transactions, according to the company’s website.

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Building off the concept credited to Menlo Park firm, investors are increasingly serving as makeshift marketing advisors and product helpers as “their people help your people.” But, with immigration challenges serving as an increasing-in-size hurdle for some founders, a few VCs are outwardly offering assistance beyond monetary help.

In fact, even the team that pioneered “VCs-As-A-Service” didn’t have much to say. When I reached out for comment, (a16z) had “nothing to share at this point.”

In contrast, outspoken firms such as Palo Alto-based and Boston-based have embraced a particularly immigrant-focused approach.

In fact, these VCs serve as a special network for immigrant founders.

“There’s a reason why people line up outside an event, and there’s a reason they stay in the party once they get in,” said , the founding partner of .

“As a venture fund, we have one hundredth of the access than a16z does,” he said. “We’re trying to bring those same resources to our companies because we recognize one to two e-mails from an executive for a company like Airbnb” can make a company move a lot faster.

While many venture capital firms offer to pay legal fees associated with helping an immigrant entrepreneur secure a visa or other legal documentation to stay in the United States, One Way Ventures partner told me that monetary support is not necessarily the issue. Rather it’s connections and education around the process that founders need help with.

“In the grand scheme of things of starting a company, it’s not about the [cost] of an application,” said Zhao. “It’s much more about the mental energy it takes” to address immigration issues.

Venture firm One Way helps founders tackle these obstacles. A popular visa for founders is the , for individuals with extraordinary ability or achievement. Among the questions asked to obtain this visa are “have you judged a major competition” or “have you been featured in reputable press.” These are all points, and factors that boost an immigrant founder’s odds for success in the application process, Zhao explained.

Even given the challenges, Zhao said he can imagine any VC tacking on immigration services if the firm already has a platform with lawyers advising on general legal help.

One Way invests in early-stage companies, and often takes deal flow from the other outspoken VC firm supporting immigrants: Unshackled. In fact, the two firms have been invested side by side in two companies to date, and .

Unshackled, which raised a $20 million fund to invest solely in immigrant founders, covers 100 percent of the legal fees associated with onboarding. It also connects founders to services. Firm founder Mehta told me that since launching this fund, about 40 startups approach him a week.

“Immigration support is a critical part of our product,” said Mehta. “It is something that has allowed us to file 100 immigration filings in the past four years.” Unshackled provides full immigration support from work authorization visas, to the Permanent Resident Card (also known as the green card). Unshackled works with 11 different visa immigration types.

Unshackled claims it has had a “100 percent success rate in procuring visas to keep talent working in the U.S.” Since Unshackled mainly invests in pre-seed companies, Mehta said the firm uses its network to help young companies get off the ground.

“We’re effectively an immigrant family and friends round,” he said, referencing to the angel network ties that some startups, with U.S. born founders, can use to their advantage.

In a similar vein, early-stage startup also wants to serve as that kind of network.

Legalpad wants immigrant founders to think of its firm as “the friend in the U.S. that happens to know a lot about immigration service,” said Legalpad co-founder and COO .

Seattle-based Legalpad uses software and attorney oversight to help speed up the process of securing visas for startup employees. While traditional law firms are cheaper, Itucas said working with those firms can take between four to six months to put together a competitive application for a visa.

Legalpad claims it takes about two months, although at a higher price.

Currently, Legalpad targets companies coming out of accelerators, mostly because an international company doesn’t have trouble getting recruited to join Y Combinator or 500 Startups. The challenge hits when the company wants to stay in the U.S. after the program ends.

LegalPad declined to disclose its partnerships as of right now, but said it submits about 20 visa applications a month.

Despite this accelerator focus, Itucas said some VCs have taken notice of LegalPad’s tech-focused approach. In fact, One Way Ventures is an investor in Legal Pad, and it sends its other portfolio companies, all with immigrant founders, to the startup for advice and help.

“We work with a handful, it’s not a jaw-dropping number,” of venture capital firms, Itucas told Crunchbase News.

As for when that number might change?

“From a resources point of view, a lot of people are just really scared to even tackle the idea of immigration,” she said. Parts of the immigration process are opaque. Education about the process is hard. Many people don’t want to offer immigration services because they think it comes with a steep price tag, which Itucas said is a false perception.

Once those roadblocks are overcome, she thinks more people will start offering immigration services.

“When you think about it, the process doesn’t cost much more than a signing bonus,” at a tech company, she said. Say $20,000 to $25,000 to walk someone through the entire immigration process. Often times less. And to Itucas, a venture capitalist spending that much for a founder to stay in the country and build a successful company is a bargain.

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While Visa did not disclose how much it was paying for the Los Angeles-based SaaS platform, the announcement of the deal prompted us to take a look at its acquisition history over time. We found that Visa has made nine known acquisitions since 2010, one-third of which were made since February 2018, according to its Crunchbase profile. (We reached out to the company to see if we’re missing anything and will update the post when they get back to us.)

Here’s what that looks like in terms of an oddly shaped chart:

Now, let’s take a look at who Visa has scooped up most recently to see what those deals can tell us.

Tap Here To Buy A Startup

In February 2018, Visa picked up , a London startup focused on developing transaction management services. The company has no recorded funding history in Crunchbase, meaning that we can’t guess too closely what Visa might have paid for it.

Then more recently, in December 2018, Visa bought , a provider of “cross border payments services” for $223.4 million.

Returning to the most recent deal, Visa’s , global head of seller solutions of Visa, said in a that the Verifi acquisition will help buyers and sellers “resolve transaction disputes” faster.

Visa’s rationale for buying Verifi was the firm’s “suite of risk and fraud management solutions,” which Visa said will “extend its chargeback and dispute resolution capabilities.” In other words, Visa is trying to cut back on how much money it loses due to fraudulent activity. With more people paying for goods digitally, the problem is likely an even bigger one than it has proved historically. The company has no recorded funding history in Crunchbase.

What do the three deals add up to? Nothing too solid, but we can say that Visa is willing to buy companies of various sizes, and with services and tooling that can augment its core services.

Who Else?

Visa is not the only credit card company buying smaller firms to make itself better.

In March, Crunchbase News’s Natasha Mascarenhas reported on American Express’  purchase of , a booking app for loungers, in its second acquisition of the year.

Then in May, American Express announced its plans to scoop up , a startup helping people get seats are restaurants, extending its buying spree. So we took that opportunity to do a deeper dive on Amex’s acquisition history over time.

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As some of the most successful private tech companies go public, many investors will pay a premium for their shares. Some of them extract premium prices for their software services. In the case of employee salaries, the biggest billion-dollar startup pay above-market rate, especially for technical roles.

Here, we take a look at employee salaries at billion-dollar tech “unicorns” through the lens of H-1B visa applications by skilled foreign workers seeking jobs at these companies. Through open data sources, we obtained program performance records and analyze it below. If you want to get right to the salary details, skip the next section, where we explain the nature of the data we’re looking at.

Sourcing Salary Data

Since companies aren’t typically willing to open their payroll records to inquiring journalists, we’re using another source of salary data.

The (OFLC) maintains and discloses records and results of work visa applications by people who are not citizens of the U.S.. The OFLC is part of the Employment & Training Administration within the U.S. Department of Labor. These are through a data portal on the OFLC’s website.

Specifically, we’re focusing on the H-1B and closely-related visa programs for citizens of Australia, Chile, and Singapore.1

According , the H-1B program “allows employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in the U.S. on a nonimmigrant basis in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability.”2 Most are granted for technical roles.

Current federal rules limit H-1B issuance to 65,000 visas per year, plus an additional 20,000 visas under H-1B’s “advanced degree exemption.” Demand for these visas far outpaces a legally-capped supply.3

This disclosure data contains information about salary levels offered by companies for specific job candidates as well as the prevailing wage for those roles. The “prevailing wage,” , “is defined as the average wage paid to similarly employed workers in a specific occupation in the area of intended employment.”

With this information, we can compare how much tech companies pay their employees on H-1B visas against market averages.

H-1B And Friends: The Tech-Focused Visas

According to for all H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 visa applications from FY 2018 (Oct. 1, 2017 through Sept. 30, 2018), 50.1 percent of certified applicants were slated to take jobs in one of the four following categories4:

• Software Developers, Applications: 20.5 percent
• Computer Systems Analysts: 15.9 percent
• Computer Occupations, All Other: 9.5 percent
• Computer Programmers: 4.2 percent

And that doesn’t include numbers from adjacent categories like systems architects, software engineering managers, etc.5 Suffice it to say that H-1B visas are typically tech-focused.6

Unicorns With The Most Recently Certified Foreign Skilled Workers

Here are the companies we’ll be analyzing. From a combined set of H-1B and related visa data (over 440 Mb of uncompressed CSVs) representing cases reviewed between Oct. 1, 2017 and Dec. 31, 2018, we extracted records for a selection of the ten highest-funded U.S-based privately-held tech companies valued at $1 billion or more in its latest round of private-market funding.

Below, we charted the counts of recently-certified H-1B, H-1B1, and E-3 visa-holding skilled foreign workers which were slated to start jobs in either 2018 or 2019.

Among the current cohort of billion-dollar private tech companies, is far and away the biggest hirer of skilled foreign workers. This being said, even though Uber is one of the most successful startups (at least in terms of fundraising and valuation; profitability is another story) it didn’t even crack the top 50 U.S. employers of skilled foreign workers. In other words, startups don’t tend to hire a lot of skilled foreign workers, as compared to more established corporations.

Companies with large national security contracts, like , tend to hire fewer skilled foreign workers. And in the case of rocket developer , because its intellectual property could be used to manufacture missiles or further geopolitical adversaries’ strategic space programs, it’s subject to U.S. (ITAR), which place additional restrictions on hiring non-citizen workers.

Salaries For Tech & Business Roles At Unicorn Startups

A common complaint about the H-1B visa program is that companies use it “to import cheap labor.” (Scare quotes intentional.) Whether that’s true or not is for others to debate.

In theory, it shouldn’t be. Employers are obligated to pay skilled foreign workers at least the prevailing wage. 7 Several government offices calculate and provide prevailing wage data. 8

In the OFLC data, the wage being offered by a company is sometimes expressed as a range. The low end of that range sometimes equals the prevailing wage (e.g. the least amount the company is legally obligated to pay in salary). For our analysis, we took an average of the lower salary value in the range. This is the most conservative way to measure the salary gap between unicorns’ employees and their location and industry-matched peers. It’s likely that companies which list a salary range for the job actually pay more than the lowest number listed, meaning that in reality the salary gap is potentially larger than what’s displayed above.

Below, we plot an average of the lower end of the listed salary range paid to skilled foreign workers, alongside the average prevailing wage, in different occupational categories, as classified by the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ . The data below represents certified applications with job start dates in either 2018 or 2019. It’s sorted by average salaries paid by our basket of unicorns.

For the sake of getting larger sample sizes, we selected from among the most hired-for technical and business categories.

Across all these categories, unicorns tend to pay salary premiums to skilled foreign workers. Our ten top-funded unicorns hired across more than fifty SOC occupation categories, ranging from “Economists” and “Cost Estimators” to “Statisticians” and “Graphic Designers.” The average salary offered by unicorns for jobs in many of these SOC categories was higher than the prevailing wage.

It Pays To Work For Big Tech Startups

Given what we’ve learned about how much top-funded unicorns pay skilled foreign workers, it’s safe to infer that top-funded unicorns pay U.S. citizens more than the average company would pay for similar work.

Keep in mind, we’re talking only about salaries here, which doesn’t include income or capital gains (or losses) from stock options packages, or the financial savings conferred by employer-subsidized health insurance.

Big tech startups pay well. Most offer excellent benefits. Play your cards right and the pre-IPO equity alone could pay for most of a decent condo in San Francisco or New York, or acres of land anywhere else.

This being said, startup stock is a lottery ticket; it’s salary that pays the bills.

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