Customer prepayments are business receipts with performance obligations, not automatically the investor’s qualifying contribution. The substantial investment test looks at funds you own, have irrevocably committed, and have put at risk relative to the cost of this particular enterprise. Cash sitting in the account against undelivered service months does not demonstrate that commitment.
Show what your own money bought
Set out the investor's contributions separately from operating receipts: equipment, software development, prepaid marketing, deposits, and payroll funded from your capital. Substantiality is proportional, with no universal dollar minimum, so the comparison is to what this business actually costs to establish. Where funds came partly from a loan, the collateral matters — personally secured borrowing is treated differently from debt secured only by the business assets.
An E-2 enterprise must be at least 50 percent owned by nationals of the treaty country, and where the owner is a company, the consular officer looks through it to the natural persons who own that company. A supplier-owned or leased item may have a legitimate operational role, but its value should not automatically be presented as property acquired by the investor. Permanent residence is not nationality, and an owner who is a United States permanent resident does not count toward the treaty-national half of the ownership.