About a year ago, Y Combinator put out one of its Requests for Startups with an unusual ask: a search for “full-stack” AI companies.

For those unfamiliar, what this roughly boils down to is that any services company (think law firms, accounting, recruiting, and so on) that could be supercharged with AI would now be in the running for its funding.

Manifest is building on two fronts. It’s maintaining Manifest OS as a software company, while powering Manifest Law as a full-stack AI law firm. And they’re starting in legal branches that benefit strongly from automation (like immigration law, which includes enormous amounts of document intake).

In case you missed it: we’ll be at SF and LA Tech Week next month. The event schedule is dropping live tomorrow… along with a special surprise we’ll be revealing next week. Where can we expect you?

Arek and Ethan 🦄

Manifest OS is building a proprietary AI-native platform for legal services, starting by specializing in corporate and individual immigration. It backs Manifest Law, a licensed law firm. While attorneys focus on strategy and practicing law, the Manifest team, thanks to its AI-native platform, handles intake, document collection, drafting support, billing, and operations, all areas previously requiring significant human effort. Lawyers can save time on tasks unrelated to planning using this AI-native infrastructure, which includes an individual client portal for communication and document collection, an immigration manager portal for tracking cases, and AI Drafter for preparing first drafts and AI Case Evaluation for identifying potential issues. It aims to provide high-quality legal representation services faster and more affordably to clients, rather than cutting costs to increase profits.

Check it out: manifestos.com

Manifest operates as two companies together. Manifest OS is a technology company that builds an AI-native platform, and Manifest Law is the law firm that it powers. Clients are quoted a flat fee during their consultation, so that they have a clear idea of exactly how much they will be charged for their case and are not billed by the hour (the industry standard).

At the age of 11, Dan Mishin had already decided he had what it takes to be a founder and entrepreneur. It all started on a trip to Berlin with his mother when the two were robbed, leaving them with just $20. They were forced to use the last of their money to stay in a cheap hostel, and on the train back home, Mishin set his mind on starting his own hostel. 

Back in his hometown of Sevastopol, Crimea, he convinced his grandmother to move in with the rest of his family so that he could list her two-bedroom apartment as a short-term rental. He spent $300 to set it up, listed it on Booking.com, and got a reservation in the first 10 minutes. It was the first backpacker hostel in the region. 

Mishin acknowledges that having no one in his family ever tell him “no” during this project certainly helped him become a founder. With the support of his family from a young age, he grew up believing nothing was too out of reach or difficult to accomplish. That mindset that has stayed with him ever since. 

When he was 20, this scrappy project called Bear Hostels had become one of the leading youth hostel companies in the CIS region. It scaled to 10 locations before being acquired in 2012 by Planet of Hospitality Holdings.

Being a travel enthusiast who has already visited more than 70 countries, it’s no surprise that he continued working with hostels throughout his life. In 2012, he co-founded and became CEO of Planet of Hostels, overseeing 13 markets and serving 60,000 guests annually. He stayed there for three years until 2015, when he moved to the U.S. 

Since then, Mishin has continued to be a serial entrepreneur. In 2017, he founded June Homes, a tech-enabled apartment rental platform. He drove the company for eight years until its acquisition in 2025, transitioning from CEO to board chairman for his last two years. In the meantime, in 2023, he also co-founded and became the board chairman of NextStory Capital, a New York-focused multi-family investor, until 2025. 

When Mishin immigrated to the U.S., he noticed a just how difficult and expensive legal processes in the immigration system were, and the transition from his O-1 visa (granted to individuals with extraordinary ability) to gaining citizenship allowed him to see how lawyers were overwhelmed with manual processes.

Having to move from different kinds of visas and spend millions of dollars on legal services across his entrepreneurial ventures, he knew there had to be a better way for the industry to treat both clients and lawyers. This paved the path for him to found Manifest and help both sides through AI. 

A record high of $4.6 billion was invested in AI legal tech last year, with most of the funding going toward tools to help existing law firms increase profit margins. While this figure is impressive, most of the proceeds have gone to law firms rather than actually helping clients. AI legal tech helps cut costs for law firms, but firms keep charging the same historically high costs to clients and making larger profits.

As of 2025, the average hourly rate for a lawyer in the U.S. is $349, with immigration lawyers specifically charging from $150 to over $500. However, clients are frequently left clueless as to how much they will be left to pay at the end of their case, and whether it would have all been worth it. So, it still ends up being an expensive and not transparent process, even with all the progress legal tech has been making. 

It is this issue that Manifest aims to solve by saving its lawyers the hassle of handling intake, document collection, drafting support, billing, and operations. Specializing in immigration law, Manifest quotes its clients a flat fee during an initial consultation, which they will be charged only if Manifest brings results.  

For lawyers, Manifest's AI-native platform reads whatever the client uploads and allows lawyers to refer to its case context whenever they need to. They can ask specific questions and get quick answers. Essentially, it automates the mundane and time-consuming processes while leaving legal judgment up to the lawyers. Thus, lawyers have more time to determine the best possible avenue for their clients.

For clients, Manifest’s platform offers real-time visibility into the status of a case. Through their own dashboard, clients can track timelines, next steps, access and upload relevant documents, receive important updates as their case progresses, and directly communicate with the legal team. 

This combination makes the whole process faster, more efficient, and more transparent for both lawyers and clients, and thus also makes it cheaper. 

The differentiating factor between Manifest being AI-native rather than utilizing AI as just a tool inside legacy software is that Manifest sees how it is used for each case by Manifest Law. Thanks to that, it learns how to process following cases faster.

With the legal services industry valued at nearly $820 billion last year, when the time comes for Manifest to expand beyond immigration, it will have a head start in a massive market. Passing on savings to clients and aiming to be their best option is just one piece of that puzzle.