By CGTN’s Mark Niu 

While there's been a lot of talk about diversity in the tech world, statistics show the percentages of men, women and minorities working in this sector haven't changed much. 

However, one Silicon Valley tech company – Atipica – believes it can change the situation by using artificial intelligence to detect bias in the hiring process. 

Based on statistics, Kimberly Schwartz is the kind of student who might find it tougher to get hired in Silicon Valley. 

She has got the right qualifications from one of the world's top universities, UC Berkeley, and has had internships at both Facebook and Apple. But she's part-Latina, part-German, part-Chinese, a woman and undocumented. 

"There's a huge lack of diversity and we don't really see Latinos. The Latinos we see are the ones working in the kitchen or cleaning services," said Schwartz. 

Luckily Schwartz’s mentor – tech entrepreneur Laura Gomez, founded Atipica to help recruiters hire more people based on merit. 

Gomez (L2) and her team at Atipica. /money.cnn.com  

"When we say the modern workforce, we include women. We include a much more diverse population," said Gomez. 

For her, this is personal as well as professional, as she grew up undocumented, too. 

And so did her product manager, Rubi Sanchez, who only found out she was undocumented after becoming a finalist for a Gates Foundation Millennium scholarship and didn't have the documentation to show she is qualified. 

"Right now, the tech sector is not merit-based. There's a lot of bias, and so to be able to help with that I think what Laura’s doing is really amazing," said Sanchez. 

Atipica's data scientists say from the very start their research discovered huge disparities in terms of gender and ethnicity on who was applying to tech companies and who was getting hired. They say the key reason is implicit bias from company processes and their hiring managers. 

Gomez says Atipica combines artificial and human intelligence to help companies sift through their own recruiting data to identify top candidates through a "bias-free" recruiting process. 

The two and a half-year-old company last year raised two million dollars led by True Ventures, which is among the largest seed-funding round for a Latina-run tech company.