[vthallam]

A great start for sure.

>Receiving significant investment of capital (at least $345,000) from certain qualified U.S. investors with established records of successful investments

Not sure what does the qualified US investors mean though. Would seed funding/angel funding from individuals not be considered for this? I guess this has been added to avoid abuse by wealthy foreigners, but how do they determine the qualified individuals or companies?

[_delirium]

I don't think it's necessarily targeted at abuse from wealthy foreigners, at least if you mean the kind wealthy enough to be putting up the whole investment themselves. There are other ways a wealthy foreigner can get a visa, like through the investor visa route. I would guess it's targeted more at visa-selling via sham investors. Something like, you charge a person $50k as a fee to "invest" $500k in their "startup", but structure it in such a way that they never actually see the money, or it comes back to you via some backdoor. Restricting it to legitimate investors who have some kind of track record probably makes it easier to police; they're less likely to running brazenly illegal schemes in the first place (gray-area stuff maybe, but probably not flat-out visa selling), and have more to lose from misusing their name/reputation.

[a13n]

I would guess you have to be an accredited investor and have some history investing in startups.

Accredited Investor:

- net worth, or joint net worth with the person's spouse, that exceeds $1 million or

- income exceeding $200,000 in each of the two most recent years or joint income with a spouse exceeding $300,000 for those years and a reasonable expectation of the same income level in the current year

[vthallam]

Guess this should be the case.