We are living through the most aggressive immigration enforcement environment in modern American history. Deportations are rising to levels this country has never seen, courts are moving cases faster than ever, and the parents, workers, and kids caught in the middle are navigating it largely alone. Only about a third of immigrants with pending cases have a lawyer, and for those without one deportation is the norm.
As we recently shared with The Economist, deportations are rising at a record pace, and they are deeply unpopular. Today, we're proud to announce how we plan to tilt the balance back into the hands of justice: the launch of Pathfinder AIDE, Actionable Immigration Data for Everyone, backed by a $5 million campaign to put it in the hands of every legal aid worker who needs it.
What does AIDE do and why is needed it now? Our flagship platform Pathfinder adoption has grown fivefold, and our users are demanding real-time insight into immigration trends and data. Pathfinder AIDE uses AI agents to give anyone instant answers about what's happening in immigration. Trained by immigration experts, watch the brief demo below to see AIDE in action:
And thanks to the support of many institutional funders, we're most of the way there, having raised $3.2 million of our goal to ensure that every legal aid worker and immigration nonprofit that needs Pathfinder AIDE gets it. Closing the final $1.8 million gap lets us bring on the developers and onboarding support we've already lined up, so we can keep pace with the five new organizations signing up every week. The faster we scale, the sooner legal aid workers get immediate answers, and with courts moving at record speed, thousands of immigrant cases can't afford to wait.
Here's why institutional funders are believing in us to turn the tide against an inhumane deportation machine.
1. Right People, Right Seats
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A bold goal is only as good as the people behind the vision. Over the past year, new and deeply experienced talent has joined the Mobile Pathways team to help bring Pathfinder AIDE to the masses; they are a major reason Pathfinder AIDE is now a living, breathing product.
Carman Nareau, our Fractional Chief Technology Officer, brings 10 years of experience spanning both philanthropy, tech, and immigration legal services, and leads the engineering that keeps Pathfinder AIDE a shipped, working product.
Elizabeth Young, our Senior Advisor, spent 12 years inside the Executive Office for Immigration Review as a judge who trained other judges, which makes her the perfect person to train Pathfinder AIDE. Her knowledge of immigration law, data, and the processes that govern immigration rights is perfectly suited to our next chapter of growth.
Camila Feltrin, our Senior Research Analyst, built her career in immigration law offices and now shares Pathfinder AIDE's data with partners and media so the world knows what is happening in immigration courts today. Together, she and Elizabeth codify the byzantine laws of immigration so AI agents always have the latest intelligence on a fast-changing landscape.
Justino Mora, our Senior Full-Stack Engineer, is a DACA recipient who engineered the nation's largest immigration data pipeline, and now he builds the AI systems inside Pathfinder AIDE that turn that data into answers.
They bolster our existing team that already knows this adversarial immigration terrain cold, led by Executive Director Jeffrey O'Brien, an award-winning immigration attorney and former Board Chair of the AILA Technology Committee. As for myself, my management consulting background at Accenture and Slalom provides me with a well tailored skillset to unleash the immense talent on our bench.
With legal expertise and AI expertise now sitting side by side, helmed at the top by a visionary new Board of Directors, we are well positioned to meet the moment of accelerating demand for our products.
2. Right Technology, Right Fit
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The demand for our data cannot be overstated:
1. To date, we have reached over 3.7 million immigrants and empowered them with legal information that guided their path forward.
2.Over 140,000 global users trust our Pathfinder data, including immigrants, legal aid advocates, nonprofits, and leading intergovernmental institutions.
3. Pathfinder's adoption has quintupled since the last U.S. Presidential Election.
4. Five new organizations sign up for Pathfinder weekly.
5. 91% of Pathfinder users recommend it to a colleague.
To learn more about this explosive growth, we designed a survey with the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL) to better understand the needs and frustrations of legal aid workers serving the immigrant community. One finding stood out: much of what legal aid workers need now lives outside federal data. Nearly a third told us they were still spending time hunting for it elsewhere. That's the gap Pathfinder AIDE is built to close.
Why? The original Pathfinder tool already ingests massive government datasets and makes them actionable, so people can see what is going on. But in today's fast-paced, deportation-first environment, many of the signals that matter live outside federal data. That painted a clear picture of where to go next: train a host of AI agents that can instantly retrieve intelligence from a far wider set of sources.
In short, the product market fit is clear. While our team continues to be underwater with demand from our partners, Pathfinder AIDE is a critical part of how we tackle it. That is exactly what this $5 million campaign is for: closing the gap so we can meet the moment and keep this success growing.
3. Vetted By The Best
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Confidence is easy to claim, hard to earn, and our success did not transpire overnight . Over the past four years, the most rigorous accelerators and advisors in the nonprofit and social venture world put us through their breathless paces, and came out the other side as steadfast believers in what we could accomplish.
Our journey began with the Fast Forward Accelerator, the leading accelerator for tech nonprofits, which gave us our start and connected us to a community of mission-driven builders who continually push us to be better.
From there, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation Data and AI Accelerator helped us make massive technological investments in data and AI in 2023, the very investments that now let us track so much of what is happening in immigration.
Next, the GitLab Foundation Economic Accelerator helped us expand into the economic impact of supporting immigrants, tracking work permits and helping people earn more, and we shared those early results live on the Demo Day stage alongside partners like OpenAI and the Ballmer Group.
This year, the culmination of all of this earned us a place in the 100X Impact Accelerator, powered by the London School of Economics, which accepts less than 1% of applicants and runs a due diligence process so thorough that one cohort member told me the last time her organization faced that level of financial and operational scrutiny, it ended in a $34 million grant.
“When 100X tells you you're ready to scale, you believe it.”
Without the vital support of these four institutional accelerators, we would not be standing where we are today.
Their scrutiny made us stronger.
Their belief made us bolder.
4. The Hurdles Ahead
While we are geared up with the right team, the right supporters, and the right technology, no plan is immune to obstacles and headwinds. That is why we are incredibly grateful to the Bridgespan Group, for spending four months with our leadership team to create an adaptive two-year plan. Together we mapped not only the opportunities ahead, but the obstacles that may lie in our path and how to clear them quickly. Here are the biggest hurdles we see, each with its mitigation plan.
Immigration will continue to be chaotic. No matter who controls Congress or the Senate after the next election, the administration will continue its deportation-heavy campaign. Indeed, our plethora of deportation data shows we are firmly on this path.
Mitigation Plan: Our mitigation plan is to stay in constant motion with our partners while being at the forefront of rumors versus fact. We meet weekly with broad coalitions of immigration nonprofits and attorneys to listen to their latest concerns, using our vast pools of data to separate fact from fiction, and then identify a path forward. As we have proven time and again, once our data is able to see the patterns in the chaos, we are then able to shed light and empower legal aid workers to form effective strategies that curtail unjust practices.
Immigration data will continue to be challenging. Over the past few years, a number of traditional immigration datasets have become harder to find or less reliable.
Mitigation Plan: Nothing is more important than the truth. The reason Pathfinder AIDE is being adopted so quickly is that it draws on the widest source there is, essentially the open sourced internet, which is continually vetted by our legal and research team to surface accurate immigration patterns in near real time. That is how we have identified patterns with the media such as hidden tribunals, mass deportation campaigns, and unfair legal tactics like arresting immigrants in court or deporting people to third countries they have never set foot in.
Put simply, our mitigation is Pathfinder AIDE itself: gather as much information as possible and put it in the hands of the broad swath of legal aid workers and media.
AI and API costs. AI is a transformative technology, and governing it safely, with real data security and privacy, requires strong investment now and into the future. Putting real-time AI agents into the hands of legal aid workers nationwide will carry a formidable AI cost.
Mitigation Plan:
We are working closely with Anthropic, whose favorable rates and support help our endeavors sustainably thrive while ensuring data privacy and security remain our utmost priorities. Simulateously, we are building long-term financial sustainability by growing the number of private law firms paying for monthly Pathfinder AIDE subscriptions, targeting $100,000 in annual recurring revenue by the end of the coming fiscal year.
The Path Forward
Behind every data point lies a dream: a parent trying to stay with their kids, an immigrant worker trying to earn a living, a family trying to build a life. And our data is telling a hard truth: immigration in the United States has become unjustly unfair.
Our request of the philanthropic community is simple: join the funders already making long-term, multi-year philanthropic commitments, so that every legal aid worker in America has access to Pathfinder AIDE.
We're $3.2 million in and need your support to close the gap. We have the team, the technology, and the track record. Pathfinder AIDE is already in use, and we're overwhelmed by demand. The remaining $1.8 million will grow our team and speed up nonprofit onboarding. Every month we wait is a month immigrants go without help that already exists.
And this year, we're bringing it to the world.
I'm all in.
I hope you'll join us.
If you are interested in learning more about making a philanthropic investment, please email me at bart@mobilepathways.org.
