Aug 16, 2023
In July, the Canadian government announced a new option for H-1B visa holders in the US to receive expedited work permits to live and work in Canada for at least three years. The new program opened to 10,000 applicants for the year, but within 24 hours, the new program had met its quota. This means thousands of people didn’t get an opportunity to even apply for the program.
Alternative to the H-1B Visa in the US
There are, however, other ways for H-1B visa holder in the United States to make their way to Canada, without worrying about the latest visa caps. By pivoting to the Start Up Visa program, and partnering with Empowered Startups, H-1B visa holders will have even better opportunities to live and work in Canada and bring their families with them. Here are the top five reasons H-1B visa holders should consider the Start Up Visa program:
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- Immigration policies in the United States are changing the likelihood you’ll be approved for an H-1B visa. While popular for years, only 14.6% of all applicants for the Fiscal 2024 year will be approved according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) figures. More than 780,000 applications were submitted.
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- The Start Up Visa for Canada hasn’t hit any caps so the likelihood of getting approval is much higher than in the United States.
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- Bring your family with you to settle in Canada – with universal healthcare for permanent residents and citizens, a culture of diversity and inclusion, and excellent public education, it’s the perfect place to bring your business.
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- Canada’s recently launched Tech Talent Strategy is providing additional resources to attract tech talent from around the world.
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- Empowered Startups can help you through the whole process from applications through successful incubation of your business. With more than a decade of experience, Empowered Startups is ready to help you achieve your business goals!
With less and less certainty of getting approved for an H-1B visa in the United States, the Start Up Visa in Canada is a viable and exciting option for entrepreneurs around the world. Find out how Empowered Startups can help you apply today.
Jul 31, 2023
Seattle, Washington – July 31, 2023 – With Canada facing the worst fire season in 100 years, and the US not faring any better, solutions to combat our changing climate threats would be welcome reprieve. Thankfully, one of Empowered Startups’ entrepreneurs is working on a system to help with early detection and prevention through innovative technology.
Through Empowered Startups’ EB2 Startup Visa program, and in partnership with the William E. Boeing Department of Aeronautics & Astronautics at the University of Washington (UW), founder Yomi Bakare mentored a team of six UW undergraduate students enrolled in the department’s capstone program during a five-month period in planning, strategizing, and building an early quadrotor prototype.
The R&D project aimed to build a quadrotor prototype that can be used by governments and agencies to predict, identify, and/or manage increasingly frequent and powerful climate disasters using Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies. Specifically, the quadrotor prototype would be designed to combat forest fires by gathering specific data points using build-in sensors and processing this data using software to decode the probability and risk severity of an event.
In this first round of R&D to reach a minimum viable product, the undergraduate team at the UW was able to create the framework of interconnected systems for quadrotor function, build out the avionics architecture connecting the sensors, battery power and remote control mechanism into a centralized system, and test several system components conducive to the quadrotor’s flight carrying a payload of equipment that would serve to send important data back to a ground control system and sustain battery power.
“The project is a timely initiative, as evidenced by the current global climate challenges the world is facing. Any attempt to provide potential mitigations to these climate challenges deserves to receive the attention and support of academia, civil organizations, businesses, and governments. We must take care of this planet for our collective well-being,” says Bakare.
The end goal of Mr. Bakare’s R&D is to have a commercially viable unmanned aerial vehicle prototype that will:
- Be remotely controlled to fly beyond line of visual sight with suitable endurance to areas of potential wildfires;
- Have built-in sensors and cameras that can detect, gather, and transmit environmental data in real-time into a remote cloud for processing;
- Have accompanying software that will receive real-time data from the built-in sensors and cameras from the remote cloud and process that data using sophisticated predesigned algorithms to predict wildfires.
So, what’s next for Yomi Bakare and the quadrotor? He is continuing to work on the prototype with hopes of completion in the near future.
“We will continue to collaborate with value-adding partners to enable us to bring the project to market within the possible shortest time frame. Work continues to refine the aerial vehicle and develop the accompanying software,” Bakare shares. “We will also work to ‘harden the UAV airframe’ to be able to handle extreme temperatures and accelerate the development of the software for predicting the probability of wildfires.”
Learn more about the EB2 Startup Visa program today.
