Why Resilient? Read our announcement to learn more about why we want to partner with immigrant founders
We are looking to partner with aspiring immigrant entrepreneurs—regardless of their current work authorization status—to build the next great B2B SaaS startup.
If this is you, please use the "Get in touch" button above to share more about yourself and any startup ideas you may have. The application period for our initial founder cohort is now closed, but we are still interested in hearing from you.
January 31st
Initial cohort: applications closed
February 15th
Co-founder(s) selected
Week of March 8th
Sprint Week with co-founder(s)
After Sprint Week, founders will get the opportunity to pitch to immigrant-friendly investors such as:
Join us
Resilient Slack Community
Our Slack community is a safe forum for aspiring and existing immigrant founders to get to know each other, share their journeys, network, and provide support.
B2B SaaS experience, either at a startup or an established company
(Optional) A rough idea for a software business that sells to businesses (note: stage of "ideas" can range from low-fidelity concept to a fully developed prototype and business plan)
Openness to High Alpha Innovation, customer, and investor feedback that can help iterate on building the business
What You Get
If we decide to launch a company together:
Initial seed funding with the potential for follow-on funding
End-to-end immigration support (e.g. lawyers, sponsorship) for founders who need it
Access to a network of operators and investors that can help bring your idea to the next level
Studio services including HR, finance, accounting, legal, design, sales, and other support
Why immigrant founders?
Immigrants are often forced to jump through hoops in the hopes of winning the lottery—both literally and figuratively—to acquire and maintain a US work visa. Starting a new company as an immigrant is even harder, with countless company and role-specific requirements that must be met to sponsor and maintain Visa status. We believe these immigration-related risks and hurdles are keeping the next generation of extraordinary immigrant entrepreneurs on the sidelines and that the venture studio model can be an attractive means to mitigate these risks and support aspiring founders in making the leap into entrepreneurship.
What's a venture studio?
A venture studio combines company building with venture funding in order to compress time, iterate quickly, and scale more ambitiously than would otherwise be possible. Partnering with an established venture studio can be a great way for aspiring founders to reduce visa-related risks while accelerating the pursuit of their dreams.
Who is High Alpha Innovation?
High Alpha Innovation (HAI) is a dedicated team of company builders, strategists, and designers that apply a proven venture studio playbook—pioneered by High Alpha—to help organizations innovate through systematic startup creation. Learn more about High Alpha Innovation at highalphainno.com.
What do we do?
We partner with talented entrepreneurs and large organizations to conceive, launch, and scale new businesses. We are constantly exploring and validating new business concepts. We design, prototype, and validate our top concepts during our quarterly Sprint Week process, which serves as the primary forcing function for launching new startups. Upon launching a new company, we surround the startup with world-class expertise in every discipline required to build a market-leading company. We compress the amount of time it takes to move from an idea to a world-class business. Our dedicated teams span practice areas, such as brand and design, product, talent and HR, sales and marketing, and finance.
What immigration-related support will be provided?
We have and will continue to engage immigration legal counsel to ensure that the Resilient program itself, as well as immigrant founders that we launch companies with, meet all US requirements. Immigration-related service provider and application fees will be considered studio services and will not be paid for out of pocket by the entrepreneur. Rest assured that we will do everything in our power to understand the entrepreneur's unique immigration-related objectives and challenges and partner with them and any outside stakeholders to mitigate risk.
Would the new company need to be located in Indianapolis, IN?
No. While High Alpha Innovation's Indianapolis office is a great communal working space available to portfolio companies, we defer to the founding team on where best to base business operations in the United States. The High Alpha Innovation team itself is remote-first and has team members from coast to coast.
There is no cost to participate, and we welcome ideas from anyone in the University of Wisconsin - Madison community.
Be on the lookout for one of several upcoming virtual idea-sharing sessions we will be hosting with different campus-based organizations, departments, and teams.
