In mid-2024, Greta Gradella, a Brazil-based product manager and designer with more than eight years of experience building digital products across telehealth, Web3, and AI-driven platforms, contracted our firm Path Law Group to pursue an O-1B visa in support of two concurrent leadership engagements with U.S.-based companies. Gradella's career had spanned some of Brazil's most consequential digital health initiatives including product and UX leadership on TelessaúdeRS, a Ministry of Health-funded telehealth platform serving over four million users annually as well as executive roles in the Web3 and Latin American proptech sectors. She later secured offers to lead product and design for Socialstack Holdings Inc.'s Values.co and Values.network platforms and for Support Sales AI Inc., a New York-based AI sales-automation company.
The mission
Menno Van Diermen, a technology executive with prior experience at NASA and the New York Shipping Exchange, agreed to serve as Gradella's designated U.S. agent and petitioner, filing an itinerary-based O-1B petition to secure her authorization to serve simultaneously as Head of Product & Design at Socialstack Holdings and as Product Manager and Designer at Support Sales AI Incorporated. This is a three-year engagement combining creative direction, product strategy, and digital design leadership across both roles.
This case proved to be less about the timeline and more about submitting the right proof. Gradella's career, while marked by genuine leadership, had unfolded almost entirely inside Brazilian organizations such as GuruLabs, QuintoAndar, Unimed Porto Alegre, and TelessaúdeRS. Many of them are privately held and without the easily documented valuations, press coverage, or public financial disclosures that USCIS typically expects as evidence of an organization's "distinguished reputation" we understood that this case could be challenging. Compounding the difficulty, some of her most senior titles, such as Chief Product Officer at GuruLabs, sat inside a small, early-stage company. Her role at a larger, unicorn-status company, QuintoAndar, had been a senior but not top-level design position. Our team built the initial petition across five of the six O-1B evidentiary criteria, anchored in her leading and critical roles, national media coverage of an earlier 3D-printed art exhibition, seven testimonial letters from executives and academics, and documented high-salary evidence spanning invoices, wire transfers, and cryptocurrency payments. Following the May 2025 filing, however, USCIS issued a Request for Evidence. While it conceded Gradella's history of leading and critical roles, it found the petition had not adequately established the distinguished reputation of the organizations behind those roles, leaving only a single criterion satisfied outright.
The RFE
Rather than treat the RFE as a dead end and filing for withdrawal, our team worked with Gradella to rebuild the organizational-distinction evidence criterion by criterion:
- Corporate stature documentation: Evidenced by including QuintoAndar's multibillion-dollar unicorn valuation and venture funding history, and TelessaúdeRS's formal affiliation with a federal Brazilian university and its Ministry of Health-funded national mandate;
- Refreshed and new letters of recommendation: We included an additional third-party reference drawn from her current Support Sales AI and Values.co engagements to reinforce the leading-and-critical-role criterion USCIS had already conceded;
- We updated national media evidence tied to her design and product work; and
- Continued high-salary documentation: Shown by comparing Gradella's compensation. We included her going-forward $120,000 U.S. salary against Brazilian and U.S. market benchmarks for product managers.
To keep the case moving despite a shift in Gradella's financial circumstances, the firm restructured its engagement so that Gradella could draft much of the RFE response herself, with our team reviewing, editing, and formally submitting the filing as attorneys of record. This was done in an effort to preserve the quality of the submission while accommodating her budget and keeping the case on track for adjudication.
Outcome
The O-1B was approved.
On August 7, 2026, USCIS approved Greta Gradella's O-1B petition following the successful RFE response. She is now authorized to continue serving as Head of Product & Design for Socialstack Holdings Inc.'s Values.co and Values.network platforms and as Product Manager and Designer for Support Sales AI Inc., leading product strategy, user experience, and digital design across both engagements in the United States.
