Impact Venture - MakerBay Foundation

Driving Meaningful Change
Through Innovation

What is Impact Venture?

An impact venture is a business model where positive social or environmental impact is fundamentally integrated with and driven by commercial success. Unlike traditional businesses that may create positive impact as a side effect, impact ventures are structured so that their core business model depends on generating measurable beneficial outcomes for society or the environment.

Early Stage Support

We partner with visionaries at the earliest stages, helping turn ideas into actionable plans.

Prototyping

Our team provides resources and guidance to develop and iterate prototypes, enabling rapid progress from concept to tangible solutions.

Market Testing

We help ventures design pilot programs and conduct real-world market validation, ensuring solutions address real needs and have potential for scale.

Business Model Creation

Working closely with founders, we co-create robust, sustainable business models that align social impact with long-term viability.

We guide founders and startups from ideation through growth

Why we need Impact Ventures?

Challenges

We live in a time of unprecedented challenges including climate change, social inequality, and systemic environmental degradation. Traditional approaches through foundations, aid organizations, and NGOs, while valuable, often create dependency cycles rather than sustainable solutions. Impact ventures offer a fundamentally different approach by developing commercial solutions that tackle these problems while remaining financially viable.

Solutions

Impact ventures are crucial because they develop "transformative, scalable and deeply impactful solutions to spark the global sectoral transitions needed" across areas like food systems transformation, circular economy, and biodiversity restoration. These businesses have the potential to solve enormous problems while generating substantial returns, challenging the misconception that impact-focused businesses aren't scalable.

Our Impact

Launched eight open calls in three years, inviting discussions on various social issues. Prospective social innovators participate in a mix of in-person and online training sessions to deepen their understanding and skills in creating social innovation ideas aimed at assisting the underprivileged. Participants benefit from comprehensive support, including training, consulting, access to a makerspace, and commercial referrals, along with the opportunity to receive up to HK$100,000 in seed funding to gradually realize their visions.

Participants

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Incubatees

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Mentoring Sessions

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Maker Skills Workshop

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Stories of incubatee

Hardware Prototyping

Equalizer Interface

While our common keyboard design excludes many people with different physical challenges, Ryan, Founder of the social enterprise AutoKeybo Limited (autokeybo.com) is particularly aware of this, as he has also encountered recurring shoulder injuries, with difficulties operating a computer. His empathy drove him to seek solutions and develop an assistive device that features a modularized full-size keyboard on the upper layer, numpad and mouse on the lower layer.

During the 6-month incubation period, Ryan received HK$100,000 of seed funding to kickstart his project and fully utilised the space, professional equipment, and technical support provided by MakerBay. Building AutoKeybo from scratch, he developed a prototype using 3D-printed components and implemented AI-powered technology. During his incubation, he developed 8 prototypes. Whereas prototypes 1 to 3 incorporated TOF sensors operated by STM32 microcontroller, prototypes 4 to 8 incorporated AI Machine Vision operated by Raspberry Pi.

Hardware Prototyping

Nutri-CAP

Nutri-CAP’s founder Corey cared for his mother in a residential care facility and observed that the dining options for elderly residents were limited and lacked proper nutrition. After conducting market research, he realized that plant-based beverages could significantly enhance nutritional intake for seniors. To address both convenience and personalization, Corey invented an on-site capsule processor, expanding dietary choices for residents beyond traditional pureed foods and soft meals.

The capsule processor offers multiple functions, including nutritional planning, an ordering app, and pre-mixed ingredient capsules. All ingredients undergo freeze-drying to preserve their nutritional value and freshness. During the incubation period, Corey focused on developing and testing the capsule processor, utilising equipment provided by MakerBay—such as 3D printers, laser-cutting machines, and electronic components. Meanwhile, he reached out to various residential care centres for product testing.

“Nutri-CAP” achieved significant milestones during the incubation period, completing two prototypes of the on-site capsule processor and developing different flavors for the plant-based beverages.

Hardware Prototyping

Clearbot

Clearbot was co-founded by Sidhant Gupta and Utkarsh Goel while studying at the University of Hong Kong. Fueled by their passion for solving ocean pollution through technology, the duo transformed a student project into a rapidly scaling, award-winning startup.

Clearbot is a cutting-edge autonomous electric boat designed to tackle the global challenge of marine pollution. Powered by artificial intelligence, Clearbot efficiently navigates waterways to collect floating waste such as plastics and debris — all with zero emissions. Each unit gathers real-time data, maps pollution hotspots, and supports ESG compliance for its clients.

MakerBay provided hands-on support for building and testing the first robot prototypes, helping the founders rapidly iterate solutions and refine their designs. As a result, Clearbot was able to bridge the gap from concept to working hardware and launch field pilots in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia.

Software Prototyping

Agewhale

Grace’s first experience as a carer left her with many regrets. Motivated by her experience, Grace works to help other carers with their challenges. She established Agewhale, a social enterprise with a vision that everyone can age well. With the seed funding from Impact Innovation Lab, she developed a mobile app that targets the needs of working carers, to raise efficiency in searching for resources and implementing care plans.

Through MakerBay Foundation, Grace studied no-code and created her own mobile app, which integrates various elderly care services and resources for carers, with reviews and sharing functions that allow them to choose suitable services. During the 6-month Incubation Period, 22 users were invited for trials.

The app features not only planning and schedule management functions but also online consultation. Users can open accounts for multiple family members on the app, and upload their medical records, referral letters, health parameters, appointments and treatment progress onto it, to get the best solution according to their situation. Users can also invite others to join in for a better evaluation of the caregiving, and division of labour among family members. One-stop management makes it easier for working carers to juggle tasks, saving time and effort for them to spend with their families.

Beyond prototyping, we also provide:

Coaching and Mentoring

For first-time entrepreneurs, starting a social enterprise is akin to learning to drive for the first time. Many entrepreneurs possess grand visions and innovative ideas. Some have even accumulated considerable experience in specific industries or hold professional qualifications. However, they often lack the broad business acumen and strategic approach needed for entrepreneurship. Limited by personal experience and resources, they frequently fail to recognise the limitations in their own projects.

Incubating social enterprises requires progress reports at various stages; based on their needs, we will offer essential feedback and support for incubated social enterprises, including referrals to partners, prototype development guidance, KPI adjustments, etc.

Training

Our incubation programme provides participants with well-rounded training. This encompasses a broad range of subjects including social innovation, project management, business modelling, user research, social impact measurement, maker skills for prototyping, marketing, and pitching skills.

Design thinking formed a fundamental concept throughout the training process. Beginning with empathy, participants engaged in various experiential activities to step into the shoes of potential service users, gaining first-hand understanding and uncovering genuine needs. We have cooperated with numerous organisations to co-host activities for participants. These past activities include grassroots community visits, homeless outreach activities, experiential workshops, project site visits, community-guided tours, human library sessions, sharing events and similar engagement activities.

Networking and Community

The power of synergy has been clearly demonstrated at MakerBay Foundation's regular community networking events. With a variety of topics, we endeavour to bring together innovators from diverse backgrounds—our incubatees, social innovators, educators, and corporate representatives. We trust these meaningful gatherings have created opportunities for innovators to connect, share thoughts and experiences, and foster cross-sector collaboration.