We spoke with Aizada Marat, CEO and co-founder at Alma, about how her company uses Mercury Invoicing to create and manage polished invoices.
Feature: Mercury Invoicing
Company: Alma
CEO and co-founder: Aizada Marat
What they’re building: A legal tech company that provides immigration services to founders, researchers, scientists, and other highly skilled professionals.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
What service does Alma provide?
Alma is a legal tech company that helps founders, researchers, scientists, and other highly skilled professionals immigrate more easily to the United States.
Right now, we offer a wide range of talent visas. These are O1-A, O1-B, EB-1A, EB-1B, EB-1C, and EB2-NIW. They've always been known as “Einstein visas” and immigrants believe that you need to win a Nobel Prize to earn them, but in reality, that's not entirely true — depending on the type of visa, it can be significantly easier to qualify for one. So we're trying to democratize access to talent visas for more highly skilled people.
To get a talent visa, people need to satisfy certain criteria. We look at their background, provide free consultations, and assess their eligibility before they apply for a talent visa. It can be life-changing — you're constantly scared that your visa will expire and there are fears around what happens if you don't change your status if you leave. So we’re able to alleviate that pressure, focusing on talent visas for highly skilled individuals. Eventually we'll move on to the other visas that are available out there, such as L-1, H1B and more.
We also utilize experienced immigration attorneys who help us provide these services. By automating the mundane and repetitive parts of their workload, we make sure they can focus on strategic, high-value tasks that are critical to the client’s case and outcome, like figuring out how to highlight the client's background to the U.S.C.I.S. (United States Citizenship and Immigration Services) in the best light. We're a startup, so we want to provide services at a completely different level than regular immigration law firms do. It's high-touch, high-quality, and comes with the fastest turnaround time on the market. It’s also personalized so that clients feel like they're getting the services that they deserve.
How did you come up with the idea?
Alma is founded from experience. I personally got some wrong immigration advice in 2018, which left me unable to work for more than a year. I had graduated from Harvard Law School and had an offer from a top law firm in California, yet I couldn't work. Back then, talent visas were not as popular. But now, they're gaining popularity because qualifying for them is not as difficult as people imagined.
All of my co-founders are immigrants. Each of us has held multiple visas before we got our green cards. We know the journey because we’ve been there before. We recently got an O-1A visa for one of my co-founders, Assel, using Alma!
And how many employees does Alma have right now?
We have 10 employees, most of whom are engineers. We also work with immigration attorneys. Alma started using Mercury from Day 1 — it was such a streamlined process to open a bank account and handle our finances. It’s super easy to use and clearly built for startups.
We also work with a third-party bookkeeping service that we give bookkeeping access to our Mercury account.
What did you like about Mercury Invoicing?
Before, when we invoiced a client, it felt like we were putting the burden on them. Now, no one complains — they just pay it right away. The invoices themselves look really nice with our name on them and take seconds to generate. They look formal, underscoring that we are in fact, providing immigration legal services.
While I’m generating an invoice, I can easily add a reference to the different visas or services being purchased. Plus, I’m able to keep everything organized, which is not only great for us but also for our clients.
How many invoices generally do you generate on a monthly basis?
It really depends. Right now, we are probably averaging around 10 to 20. Of course, we will generate more as the company grows.
Walk us through your experience using Mercury Invoicing.
What I enjoyed about the experience is that on the right side, I can already see how the invoice is going to look while I'm inputting the numbers on the left side. It has our name, it has our address, and it looks like an official invoice. Since usually startups are the ones paying for these visas, they need to have something formal for accounting purposes. The generator is also super intuitive to use and took me seconds to understand. All I have to do is plug in the service, the quantity, and the price, and it automatically sums up how much the client owes, which is a cleaner way to calculate than directly putting the total sum.
For our internal notes, I can put the client's name for reference. I love that it goes to a specific account because we always want to keep all our account receivables in a designated account separate from our checking and savings. I also like that once the money comes in, I get a notification and can immediately see everything in accounts receivable to track revenue.
It’s all super easy to use because if I were to ask anyone else on my team to generate invoices, I don't have to teach them how to do it, it's self-explanatory.
How do you keep track of invoices? Have you used other features for filtering or seeing what's due?
Yes. That’s another feature I like — that I can add a due date for when the invoice has to be paid. For example, I got an email from a client asking to extend the deadline for two days because they were waiting for VC money to hit their account. All I had to do was go in and extend the deadline. And if someone is nearing the deadline, I can just click “remind” and it generates an automated email in the same flow.
How has Mercury Invoicing impacted your company’s processes?
It saves a lot of time, and it's really good for accounting and bookkeeping purposes — that's what startup founders always struggle with. Usually, the accounting team needs this and that, but this tool keeps everything organized, not only for us but also for our clients.