The H-1B system is broken.
780,000+ applicants. ~25% selection. A $100,000 overseas filing fee. $10K–$15K legal bills per petition. Employers are leaving the program — and the talent has nowhere to go.
The numbers don't work anymore.
FY24 applicant pool, selection rate, and the cost structure crushing sponsors.
Cost plus uncertainty is pushing companies off H-1B entirely.
Lottery uncertainty
Three out of four H-1B petitions are rejected before a single merit review. Recruiting plans can't be built on a coin flip.
Legal cost
$10K–$15K in employer-side legal fees per petition — spent before you know whether the candidate was even selected.
Timeline risk
Months of waiting even for selected candidates. Projects, launches, and hiring plans stall on an immigration calendar.
Compliance burden
Full visa sponsorship carries ongoing compliance exposure most employers aren't staffed to carry — so they stop sponsoring.
A $100,000 fee changes everything.
The $100,000 overseas H-1B filing fee that took effect in 2025 makes international H-1B economically unviable for most sponsors. Add $10K–$15K in legal fees on top, stack months of waiting, and the math stops working for nearly every employer trying to hire from abroad.
The result: hundreds of thousands of qualified professionals overseas — engineers, researchers, athletes, entrepreneurs — are locked out of a system that was already rejecting 585,000+ applicants a year through the lottery. They don't need a better H-1B. They need a different visa.
O-1 is the answer. No one has built the infrastructure.
20,000+ O-1 visas issued per year. No lottery. No cap. Merit-based. So why isn't it obvious?
Why no marketplace exists for O-1
- Most skilled professionals don't realize they qualify — 60% of 500+ candidates we assessed qualified and didn't know.
- The O-1 petition requires a US employer interest letter — the single hardest piece to source.
- Attorneys can't systematically source employers; they need a marketplace, not a Rolodex.
- No existing platform bridges employer demand with O-1 candidate supply.
- No existing competitor operates in this space end-to-end.
Why we built O1DMatch.
The bottleneck isn't demand. It's infrastructure. We built the marketplace, the AI scoring, the USCIS-formatted letter flow, and the signing infrastructure that turns O-1 from an attorney-gated specialty into a scalable hiring channel.