Scammed and exploited, she built an AI-driven app for immigrants like her | TechCrunch

Immigrants face an enormous number of challenges and difficulties. In particular, without a local base of family or friends to depend on, new immigrants often find themselves in the dark about reliable information on essential services like housing, healthcare and banking.

After being scammed and exploited, one immigrant founder decided to try to help other immigrants address such issues, and she has built an AI-powered service trained on data specific to these needs: Imii is an AI assistant for immigrants that aims to help them settle down and integrate in their new home countries. 

The startup’s co-founder, Jane Fisher, was born and raised in Japan, in a family of immigrants from the Soviet Union. “My father was a prominent figure in Japanese studies and a published author by the time he moved to Japan,” she told TechCrunch. “But he was discriminated against and looked down on by his colleagues for many years simply because he was an immigrant, and therefore by default undesired,” she said.

Fisher is understandably passionate about the subject. “I created imii because I know the struggles of immigration first-hand. I had different experiences of moving to another country — both an assisted one (with a coordinator that was guiding me) and solo (with no external guidance). Despite the fact that the latter one was moving to the U.K., where I’d studied and fluently spoke the language, it took a massive toll on my mental health and adaptation period. I got scammed on the way, too,” she added.

Imii offers personalized advice to immigrants and connects them with trusted local providers and businesses who speak their language, whenever that’s an option. On the app, users sign up, answer a few questions, and receive personalized guidance. The chatbot — temporarily powered by ChatGPT 4o until the startup completes a fundraise — provides advice on housing, banking, and healthcare. And if it can’t assist with a query, users can directly contact the Imii team for help.

“It is trained on our content database and provides user-friendly answers to specific questions. Our aim is to make imii sound like an empathic human assistant rather than a soulless database,” said Fisher. Her co-founder and CTO, Alexandra Miltsin, previously worked with Zoopla and Yelp, where she led the development of multiple AI-powered products. 

Besides the potential societal benefits, Fisher argues that the app could benefit companies who hire international talent, as it could reduce expenses on relocation management, improve employee well-being and productivity, and potentially lower staff turnover rates.

The startup also offers a version for businesses that lets them list their services and specify their target demographics. Employers can integrate Imii into their HR processes, providing international hires access to the app to prepare them for their relocation.

“We have been approached by several service provider companies for partnership opportunities, which we are currently finalizing,” said Fisher.

The immigration and relocation tech space has a few emerging and established players already. Some of these concentrate on the actual immigration process, and others on settlement ‘in situ’. 

Matutto (primarily B2C) focuses on providing relocation services directly to consumers, and came out of TechStars. Meanwhile, Benivo (B2B) specializes in providing relocation solutions for businesses, and has raised $30 million in total. 

Welcome Tech (B2C, not yet launched) claims to provide a digital platform designed to assist immigrants with various aspects of relocation. It raised $30 million in April 2022, taking its total to $73 million, but hasn’t emerged from stealth since 2022. 

There are a few others, too, such as Perchpeek (B2B), Settly (B2B), Relocity (B2B) and Localyze (B2B).

However, Fisher says, few of her competitors think deeply about the immigrant experience: “We are human-centric. We care about the immigrants’ experience more than creating yet another relocation tech software for corporates. That’s why we started with a very lean B2C concept to make perhaps a simpler, but truly impact-focused product available to all, and offer upgraded versions to commercial beneficiaries.”

“We don’t think a massive company needs yet another relocation service. We do think startups, SMEs, NGOs and organisations like the U.K.’s NHS do,” she added. 

She also said the app will evolve from using OpenAI to providing more, fleshed-out services: “It’s not just information, it’s also if they need credit building for immigrants, or legal assistance. That’s not something you can just get through a GPT wrapper.”

Currently the startup is offering the app on a freemium basis to individual users, and as a paid service with relocation/settling-in assistance for B2B customers. It also charges service providers on its marketplace an affiliate marketing commission.

Imii appears to be very much “on trend.”

Approximately 281 million people are counted as international migrants around the world, representing 3.6% of the world’s population, per a United Nations report. Moreover, the World Bank projects that by 2050, climate change could displace up to 216 million people. And, the UNHCR estimates that in the coming years, the number of climate refugees will increase significantly, with some projections suggesting up to 1.2 billion people could be displaced globally by 2050 due to climate-related events.