IN THIS GUIDE · Digital enterprises and verifiable U.S. operations
Start with the E-2 eligibility and application overview
Explain the product and delivery
Describe what customers pay for and how the enterprise fulfils that promise. Evidence might include an operational product, service contracts, billing records or delivery workflows. A landing page and domain registration show some preparation, but not the complete business. Identify what remains to make the offering usable and commercially available. Turn the operating description into a sequence: customer need, product or service, delivery method, payment, and evidence for each step. This exposes whether the business is ready to trade or whether a key licence, supplier, platform, or contract remains only anticipated.
Locate the enterprise’s activity
Explain the U.S. entity’s role, people, service arrangements and business presence. If contractors or systems are abroad, identify their relationship with the U.S. operation accurately. Do not imply that moving the founder automatically moves every activity or that a mailing address alone establishes a functioning U.S. commercial enterprise. Trace the investor’s authority through formation documents, service agreements, and the people doing work outside the United States. For a company, treaty nationality ordinarily depends on treaty-country nationals holding at least half of its ownership; an address does not answer that question.
Document paid resources and rights
Link development spending, software, equipment and contractual rights to the investor and the business. Distinguish founder effort and hoped-for intellectual-property value from documented qualifying capital. Intangible assets can raise valuation questions; explain the support for any claimed value instead of using a venture fundraising valuation as the invested amount. Reconcile every claimed contribution to a bank record, invoice, agreement, or transfer document and mark whether it is paid, irrevocably committed, or contingent. That exercise also shows whether an escrow condition protects the investor in a way that remains consistent with the required risk.
Support scalable revenue realistically
Explain pricing, retention, sales conversion and delivery costs using real evidence where available. Separate active paying customers from free accounts, enquiries or social followers. Low physical overhead does not remove substantiality or non-marginality requirements. A smaller-cost enterprise still needs a meaningful qualifying commitment relative to its actual establishment and operating needs. Hypothetical example: An archival-digitization studio has paid for scanning equipment and a customer-portal build, but its principal service contract is unsigned. The decision is whether the paid resources and operating plan independently support a real enterprise or whether the contract is still the missing commercial foundation.
Where digital-enterprise cases break down
Digital cases fail at the point where the business must be shown to exist somewhere. The recurring pattern is an enterprise with a polished presence, real spending and no identifiable U.S. operating function, because development sits with overseas contractors and the founder intends to run everything personally. A second pattern is capital that turns out to be recurring cost, where a monthly platform subscription is presented as committed investment. The earliest signal of both is a budget whose largest items are subscriptions. Identify what the U.S. entity actually does, who performs it, and which expenditures are irrevocably committed rather than payable month by month.
Sources reviewed 2026-09-07. This guide covers a preparation focus; it is not an individual eligibility assessment.