Global talent for a global business: Migrant workers fill start-ups

Start-ups have increasingly become reliant on foreign nationals as the skills shortage continues, new research has revealed. An economist stresses the importance for companies to execute in a shifting migration policy environment.

Start-ups founded between 2020 and 2025 with at least $100 million in funding during this period were found to be reliant on non-citizen employees, HR tech company Deel’s recent data revealed.

Based on its user data, HR tech company Deel found that out of its 4,000 platform users who were employed by a start-up between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, about 1,000 (26.7 per cent) were immigrants.

“Half of US-based employees working in AI roles in top VC-funded start-ups on Deel are foreign nationals … It’s a global business that attracts global talent,” Deel economist Lauren Thomas said.

Through these findings, Deel identified an increase in representation of Indian national skilled migrants as a “growing force in global technology employment”; however, it noted the role that migration policies and visa structures in countries such as the UK and the US had in curbing skilled migration.

“Since the United States restricted its HB-1 visa, Australia has attracted a greater share of skilled Indian workers, while the trend for hiring Indian workers has noticeably declined in the US and Canada. The UK’s share of Indian skilled workers has also declined following that country’s crackdown on immigration in mid-2025,” Thomas said.

The platform’s data showed that the surge in growth of active Indian workers on the platform in Australia was 724 per cent year on year, compared to growth in the UK (142 per cent), the US (139 per cent), Ireland (131 per cent), and the UAE (121 per cent).

Thomas noted that the share of Indian nationals in Australia increased in early 2025, levelled out in mid-2025, and rose sharply again in late 2025.

“This evidence suggests that Australia might be picking up workers that otherwise would have gone to the US or UK,” Thomas said.

A recent report by the International Bar Association’s Global Employment Institute showed that the ongoing skills shortage across labour markets was driven by demographic shifts and a competition for talent, noting the investment in upskilling, reskilling, and targeting migration policies across government and employers to tackle these shortages.

“The talent competition is global and accelerating. Policy environments are shifting faster than most companies can track. The organisations that can execute on this are pulling ahead of the ones that can’t,” Thomas said.

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Carlos Tse

Carlos Tse is a graduate journalist writing for Accountants Daily, HR Leader, Lawyers Weekly.