Making the Case for H-1B Infrastructure

The H-1B program is under more scrutiny than it’s faced in years, with shots coming from all sides. Project Firewall has placed employer compliance squarely in the spotlight, while the $100k fee and new proposed rules could reshape the lottery entirely. For employers, practitioners and the platforms that serve them, the margin for error is shrinking: and the cost of getting it wrong is going up.

This is a strange moment to be building in immigration tech, but also a clarifying one. As compliance pressures rise, the value of speed, accuracy and review rise in turn.

O*NET, O*NET, O*NET…

Every H-1B filing starts with the same manual work: determining the right SOC code for a position, looking up prevailing wages for the worksite(s) and ensuring that the offered wage meets or exceeds the locally-defined prevailing wage. It’s not difficult. But, it’s tedious at volume, error-prone under pressure and material to the success of the filing.

The underlying data is public: OFLC publishes prevailing wage tables, O*NET has occupation classifications and years of LCA disclosures can be accessed by all. But public data doesn’t mean usable data.

I think that’s a missed opportunity.

What Threshold Does

Threshold is an API that handles the data work so platforms and practitioners don’t have to. We’ve cleaned, normalized and enriched data from these public sources into a one-and-done tool for H-1B filings:

• SOC code lookups and occupation matching

• Prevailing wage data by area and wage level

• Employer filing histories and competitor intelligence from LCA disclosures

One integration, current data, no spreadsheet archaeology.

The Bet We’re Making

The idea behind Threshold came from working in the immigration tech space, where it’s difficult not to notice a similar pattern: each startup sets out to rebuild the whole platform. Client intake, document ingestion, case management: the whole stack.

But as the market matures, I think the ecosystem will favor integrations over monoliths. Platforms that focus on workflow automations and client experience, and plug into specialized infrastructure for the rest. Threshold is built for that future: an intelligence layer that makes H-1B automation possible without rebuilding the data pipeline from scratch.

There’s also a quieter opportunity here: LCA disclosure data is full of competitive intelligence that’s largely untapped simply because it’s too messy. Employer filing patterns, wage trends, geographic distributions. We’re surfacing that too.

Early Access

We’re opening the Threshold API to a small group of platforms and firms in the first few weeks of 2026. If you’re building in immigration and want to see what’s possible, request access here.