Does receipt of the contribution begin conditional residence?

No. The relevant immigrant-visa admission or adjustment approval starts conditional residence.

Use the actual immigration event

A funding date does not determine the I-829 anniversary. Hypothetical example: a Corman Park operator of a seed-cleaning and grain-conditioning plant receives a gift from a parent that is wired into the project escrow in April. The family writes April on the calendar as the start of the two years and begins counting toward an I-829 filing.

That calendar is wrong on two counts. First, the wire confirmation belongs in the lawful-source file, together with the gift letter and the parent's own records of how the money was earned, since a gift still has to be traced to its origin and along its path. Second, the wire proves nothing about residence.

Conditional residence starts on the date of admission with the immigrant visa or the date the adjustment application is approved, and that date appears on the admission record and on the card, not on any banking document. The practical question for this household is what to file where: keep a residence folder holding the visa, the entry record and the card, and a separate capital folder holding the escrow receipt, the subscription agreement and the source evidence. When the plant's busy season makes an entry date inconvenient, the choice is to enter later and accept a later anniversary, or to enter within the visa's validity and return to Canada briefly, which raises its own questions about maintaining residence that should be assessed before booking anything.

Jobs, risk and participation are still assessed at the removal-of-conditions stage.