Committed vs raised

Two numbers appear on every raise page and people routinely confuse them, usually in the direction of thinking a company got rich. Committed is how much money backers put into escrow. Raised is how much the company actually receives. When a raise is popular, those numbers are nowhere near each other.

The goal is a cap, unless the raise page says otherwise

A raise goal on Backable behaves like a hard ceiling on what the company can receive. If a raise with a $240,000 goal attracts $15.3M in commitments, the company still receives $240,000. Everything above the goal stays with the backers who committed it, held by the same program, and each of them claims their share back.

How your allocation is decided

Everyone in a raise pays the same price per token. What differs is how many tokens your commitment buys, and that is decided by an accumulator that weights your commitment by how long it stayed in escrow. Money committed on day one accrues weight for the entire window; money committed in the final hour accrues almost none.

This solves a problem you have probably seen elsewhere. If allocation were purely proportional to size, a whale arriving in the last minute would take the raise. If it were first-come-first-served, the raise would be decided by who had the fastest connection at the opening bell. Time-weighting rewards conviction that showed up early and stayed.

Time-weighting is still the base. An early-fill boost still rewards money that arrived while the pool was empty. Approved Aligned Parties addresses are taken out before that scoring runs, so the pool everyone else competes over is smaller than the committed total.

Ownership Score does not change what the company receives. Raised is still the goal, or on a raise with a cap the amount taken at close. It changes how that amount is divided when more money is committed than the company can take. Your score multiplies the time-and-boost weight on your commitment, and you are never allocated more than you committed. A low score does not lock you out. It can mean less of your commit converts, and more of it comes back to you. The worked example below is the time-weight split on its own.

A worked example

What to do with this when you read a raise page

While a raise is live, treat committed as a demand signal rather than a valuation. A raise sitting at 400% of goal is telling you that your effective allocation will be small and most of your money will be waiting for you to claim back, not that the company is worth four times more. After close, the number that matters is raised, that is the money the team actually has to build with, and it is what the monthly budget draws against.