When Ramiro Roballos immigrated to the United States from Argentina, he expected the visa process to be complex. He didn’t expect it to feel broken. At the time, Roballos had already built an unconventional career. He had conducted orchestras, founded a music school, earned an MBA, worked at McKinsey, and taught himself how to code. Yet despite his credentials and resources, navigating U.S. immigration felt like entering a black box.
“There was no transparency,” Roballos recalls. “You didn’t know what was happening, who was working on your case, what stage it was in, or whether anyone had even looked at it.”
The frustration wasn’t directed at immigration attorneys. If anything, he sympathized with them. The problem, as he saw it, was that the entire system had become buried beneath bureaucracy, manual processes, endless documentation, and fragmented communication.
For Roballos, the experience revealed a much larger opportunity.
Today, he is the founder and CEO of Tukki, an immigration technology company using AI and workflow automation to help individuals and employers navigate visas and green cards faster, with greater transparency and fewer errors. The company recently won a $1 million investment through the prestigious 43North startup competition and has raised nearly $2 million in funding as it expands from serving individual applicants into enterprise immigration management.
But Tukki’s story is not simply about applying AI to legal services. It is about rethinking the operating system behind immigration itself.
Learning the Problem From the Inside
Many founders identify inefficiencies from the outside, Roballos decided to immerse himself in them.
Before building Tukki’s platform, he spent months working immigration cases as a paralegal, helping prepare petitions, communicating with applicants, gathering evidence, and observing how firms actually operated.
What he found surprised him.
Most immigration workflows relied on a patchwork of emails, PDFs, shared folders, spreadsheets, and manual reviews. Cases containing hundreds or even thousands of pages of documentation moved slowly between applicants, paralegals, attorneys, and government agencies.
The process was not only inefficient. It was difficult to monitor, difficult to improve, and nearly impossible to scale.
“We didn’t just build an interface,” Roballos says. “We changed how the process works.”
Rather than layering software on top of traditional legal workflows, the company built a platform where every interaction happens in a single system. Documents, communication, reviews, quality checks, attorney collaboration, and client updates all occur inside the platform.
The result is a structured environment that creates visibility across every stage of a case while generating the data necessary for automation and continuous improvement.
Compressing Months Into Weeks
One of the clearest examples of Tukki’s operational approach can be found in case timelines. Traditional extraordinary ability visa applications, such as O-1 petitions, often take four to six months to prepare before filing. By redesigning workflows and eliminating bottlenecks, Tukki has reduced that timeline dramatically. The company has completed cases in as little as four to five weeks from signed engagement to petition submission.
Part of that improvement comes from abandoning traditional batch processing. Most law firms wait until a client has gathered all documentation before beginning substantial work. Tukki breaks cases into dozens of smaller tasks that can move simultaneously through the system. Attorneys, clients, and support staff collaborate continuously rather than waiting for entire document packages to be completed.
The Next Chapter: Enterprise Immigration
For much of its history, Tukki focused exclusively on individual applicants. That strategy allowed the company to refine its workflows, validate its platform, and understand the nuances of immigration management at scale.
Now, a new phase is emerging.
The company has already onboarded several businesses, including multinational organizations with thousands of employees, as it expands beyond individual applicants and into enterprise immigration management. To support that growth, Tukki is launching a dedicated B2B platform designed to help employers manage immigration processes for global talent.
As companies compete internationally for skilled professionals, immigration increasingly affects hiring, retention, and workforce planning. Delays and inefficiencies that once frustrated individual applicants are becoming strategic business challenges.
Tukki began by helping immigrants navigate a system that often felt opaque and overwhelming. Now, it is bringing that same clarity to the companies that depend on them.
For Roballos, the mission has not changed. The customer has simply expanded.
If Tukki succeeds, immigration may no longer feel like a slow-moving barrier between people and opportunity, but a faster, more transparent pathway for both the talent building the future and the companies trying to hire them.
