Proof, Not Promises: What It Takes to Build an Impact Venture That Lasts | SFi Innovation Lab Founder Interview Series

Building an impact venture often begins with something that is hard to ignore: an environmental or social system that clearly is not working, a problem you have lived through, or a question that lingers long after everyone else has moved on.

SFi Innovation Lab brings together founders building practical solutions to those kinds of environmental and social challenges. In this first part of the Founder Interview Series, we asked some of them to reflect on the conviction that first pulled them in, the beliefs they later had to unlearn, and the assumptions impact investors often get wrong about businesses like theirs. These reflections rarely make it into a pitch deck, but they form the scaffolding that allows a company to stand up and stay up over time.

For Dustin Jefferson S. Onghanseng, founder of environmental intelligence company uHoo, it started during his MBA at HKUST. He had constant allergy attacks, as did other students, and noticed that everyone felt better almost immediately when they stepped outside the campus buildings. He complained to the school, but nothing changed – “That was the moment it stopped being an abstract problem and became personal,” he says.

He and his co-founder, Brian, dropped their classes to build uHoo, despite having job offers waiting, little capital beyond their savings, and parents who did not support the decision. It was not an easy leap, but the alternative felt harder. They still graduated alongside their batch, finishing the coursework afterward, at their own pace.

For Anne Yeung of OneChain, the question was not whether plastic was being collected for recycling, but whether anyone could prove what happened to it afterwards. She had seen too much recycling that existed on paper but could not be traced in reality. “If we cannot trust the data, we cannot really claim impact or unlock serious finance,” she says.

What nearly stopped her was not the technology, it was the loneliness of being a solo female founder in a world of deep tech. There were moments when pursuing something simpler seemed like the easier option. But she kept coming back to the same belief: if the underlying infrastructure is right, it can change how environmental action is measured, financed and scaled.

Rishabh Khanna of Earthbanc remembers a different kind of turning point. In his twenties, after co-founding the Indian Youth Climate Network, he was struck by how few people around him seemed to care about the scale of the climate crisis. “That indifference did something I didn’t expect,” he says. “Instead of pushing me away, it pulled me further in.”

But the thing that tested him the most was the sheer size of the problem. There have been moments, he says, when it felt paralysing rather than motivating. “The doubt never fully disappears. I have simply learned to keep working alongside it.”

Their businesses operate in very different worlds, but their stories begin in a similar place. Each saw a gap between a sustainability promise and the reality on the ground, and decided that simply noticing it was no longer enough.

A harder lesson

The next lesson was less romantic. Several founders began with the reasonable assumption that customers would pay for a product because it was good for people or the planet. Most soon learned that impact alone does not close a sale.

At uHoo, the team initially believed businesses would invest in indoor air quality simply because they cared about employee health and wellbeing. “That's not enough,” Onghanseng says plainly. “It is not a primary driver.”

What businesses do respond to, he learned, is financial impact. uHoo rebuilt its pitch around return on investment, changing not just its messaging but how the company developed its product and approached clients.

Urban Spring CEO Ronald Li came to a similar conclusion. His company provides smart water refill stations, but initially assumed that a better-designed, more sustainable water station would be enough to win enterprise customers. It was not. Landlords and building operators wanted to understand operational efficiency, asset value and user engagement. Urban Spring responded by repositioning its offer as Hardware-as-a-Service, with real-time data that can feed into building management systems, ESG reporting and green-building standards.

The result was a shift from being seen as a nice sustainability feature to something closer to business infrastructure. As Li puts it, the question changed from “What does this cost?” to “How much asset value does this create?”

Khanna describes a similar change in his own work. Earlier in his career, he believed that demanding more from governments and companies would be enough to create change. Over time, he found that pressure alone did not move things far enough. “Pressure can point at a problem,” he says, “but a working model that pays for itself is what actually moves it.”

What investors frequently get wrong

If customers taught these founders to lead with ROI, efficiency and proof, investors sometimes still miss the point. Here are some of the most common misconceptions:

❌ "Cheaper is good enough."

Onghanseng argues a cheap sensor produces a number, but a number on its own isn't the same as trustworthy, actionable data with a complete system (remote calibration, software, continuous updates, integrations, visualizations, analytics, etc.) behind it – most competitors in the space stop at the raw reading, without the system needed to validate it and make it usable. The real value is in the infrastructure between the two.

❌ "Hardware cannot scale." 

Li counters that physical infrastructure solving a real operational pain point drives commercial growth, not just impact.

❌ "Nature-based solutions equal carbon credits."

Khanna notes credits are just one revenue line; restored ecosystems also support water, food and community resilience – returns that take longer but "the patience it asks for is the edge, not the drawback." He argues this is, in fact, a low-risk, high-return model over the long run, and that investors who walk away at the first mention of a longer horizon miss out on the durable, compounding value restored land can produce for decades.

❌ "Better tech will fix behaviour." 

Marcel Smits, speaking of Droppie, the Dutch store format paying consumers for handing in recyclables, points out recycling is a psychological problem as much as a technology one – without the right incentives, even the best equipment underperforms.

Different sectors, same blind spot – investors keep underestimating the unglamorous infrastructure that actually turns impact from decorative to durable, such as data systems, verification and incentive design.

The part behind the pitch

There are parts of this work that never make it onto a slide, yet they are often the reason a founder keeps going.

For Yeung, it is watching invisible labour finally become visible – all waste workers and community groups whose contribution has long been left out of the sustainability story, now made countable and valued through the systems she builds. For Li, it is standing in a school or neighbourhood and watching a teenager choose a refill station over a plastic bottle without being told to, knowing that habit may outlast any pitch deck. For Khanna, it is the people beside him, the ones who show up on the hard days as much as the good ones, who make a long, uncertain fight feel like something worth staying in.

There is no single template for turning conviction into a company. Some founders had to rethink their pricing, others their product, their partners or their pace. But not one of them described walking away from the problem that pulled them in to begin with. If anything, the discipline of building a business only sharpened their sense of purpose, and that is where ambition quietly becomes impact.