About Us

Impact Seed was the culmination of a chance meeting between Co Founders Kylie Hansen and Sven Stenvers in 2012.

After a 15 year background in tech, telecommunications and clean energy startups, Sven exited his renewable energy venture in 2011, continuing to focus his passion for working with profit-for-purpose organisations.

Kylie was then the Chair of Cambodian/Australian social enterprise, Empowering Communities, having just returned to a Perth after a year long term as its CEO, and was concurrently working in roles with WA community services peak bodies, and studying social impact at UWA.

After working together through 2013, their professional relationship evolved into a personal one, and over the next 2 years Sven and Kylie sought to further align their life and work with with their values, exploring the WA startup ecosystem for investable social enterprises. What they found was a WA startup, innovation and investment ecosystem which was overtly tech-centric, in which you were identified as “either a business, or a social enterprise, not both”.

Not satisfied with WA’s lack of support for social innovation, impact investment, or social enterprise and impact businesses, Kylie and Sven founded Impact Seed in 2015 at WA’s inaugural Social Impact Festival.

Since then, Impact Seed has supported over 100 founders, numerous not for profit, business, investor and government stakeholders.

We have developed an active government advocacy profile, a skills-based incubator and commercialisation program (ImpactSpark), workshops covering impact investment, impact measurement; and the WA Innovation Hub – investing in Western Australian social innovation projects which collaboratively address some of our most challenging social issues through a hub and spoke network and funding vehicle.

Impact Seed is part of the rapidly emerging Impact Investment ecosystem which aims to solve society’s greatest social and environmental challenges through the power of the markets.

We believe social impact business is the future way of all business.  Consumer choice is increasingly driven by conscience, not just product value. An overwhelming majority of under 40’s believe business’ purpose extends beyond profit and 60% of HNW’s see driving social impact with their investments as ‘extremely or very important’.

We are passionate about growing impact investment alongside business, investors, foundations and not-for-profits wanting to integrate social impact as mission aligned investments.

Our founding team have diverse and successful experience in commercial, startup, not for profit and social impact sectors in Australia and globally, and are passionate about bridging the gap by driving social innovation through impact investment.