Marie Cheong’s 100x100 approach proves that scale and impact don’t have to be mutually exclusive

This story is one of nine on The Peak Singapore’s Power List. The list is an annual recognition that celebrates and acknowledges individuals who have demonstrated exceptional leadership, influence, and impact.

The theme for the class of 2025 is Vanguards, spotlighting business leaders who are boldly reshaping their industries, questioning outdated norms, and pushing boundaries with vision and conviction. At a time when conformity is often rewarded and change met with resistance, these individuals choose to lead from the front — not for applause, but because the future demands it.

Some leaders disrupt. Some accelerate. And some — like Marie Cheong — cut through the orthodoxy and completely rebuilt the terms of engagement. To understand what it means to be at the vanguard of climate tech in Southeast Asia, begin with a myth Cheong finds tiresome: that investing in “impact” is a concession, a compromise on profit for the sake of virtue.

“Investing in ‘impact’ means lower returns,” she says, repeating the phrase with deliberate scepticism. “One of the most common questions we get asked is, ‘Is investing in climate tech concessional?’ At Wavemaker Impact, we are driven to prove it’s possible to uncover opportunities that are needle-moving from a climate change perspective and highly scalable and profitable.” 

This is her thesis — and her challenge to the room: If the only climate solutions that scale are those that survive the discipline of the market, then the vanguard must learn to move with both idealism and commercial rigour.

Breaking the myth

Cheong co-founded Wavemaker Impact to serve as the connective tissue between ambition and execution in climate entrepreneurship. The firm’s model is radical in its scale and simplicity: Identify and build companies that can each abate at least 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, and become $100 million revenue businesses in the process.

“Our 100x100 thesis focuses on opportunities that are large from a carbon emissions abatement perspective and commercially driven… The only way to achieve this is with high-growth solutions that create real value for customers.” Their ventures stretch from Indonesia to Vietnam, from the most unglamorous corners of agriculture to the gleaming rooftops of urban solar. 

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However, Wavemaker Impact is neither a typical venture fund nor a feel-good impact investor. The company designs, funds, and scales climate tech startups that target abatement at a planetary scale, then embeds these founders with hard-edged commercial discipline.

Cheong and her team are obsessed with incentives: “Achieving these outcomes is possible because we focus on creating incentives for customers to adopt commercially ready technology — just like Grab created an incentive for a stranger to drive another stranger around and changed the way we commute without inventing cars.”

She offers Arysun as proof — a consumer tech solar business that brings plug-and-play systems to middle-income households at 80 per cent lower cost than conventional solar. “It’s able to make a 40 per cent margin on its products. When we look at Arysun’s early traction and comparable companies in the consumer tech space, there’s every reason to believe that this company could be a fund returner.”

Cheong is equally intent on challenging the mystique of “deep tech” as the only real game in climate innovation. “There’s a perception that all climate tech is deep tech — direct air carbon capture, nuclear fusion and material science. While deep tech innovation is essential… most of this technology is 10 years or more away from being commercially scalable.”

Instead, she insists that at least half the battle can be won with what’s already on hand. Her calculations show that 50 per cent of carbon emissions can be abated by technology that we have today.”

Rewriting climate tech

The real gap, Cheong insists, is not in science but in adoption and entrepreneurship. “If there’s one thing that the startup world knows how to do, it’s to create incentives to drive the adoption of technolog,y and that’s exactly what we’re looking to leverage.”

And so, Wavemaker Impact brings in battle-tested founders — sometimes from entirely unrelated fields — to drive this change. Cheong describes, with quiet pride, the journey of founders who pivot to climate tech with little technical background but plenty of drive. 

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Pawel Kuznicki, for example, once ran a peer-to-peer lending startup for SMEs before joining Wavemaker Impact to launch WasteX. “Last year, the WasteX team successfully accredited their biochar machine for carbon credits with a leading European standard, unlocking carbon credit revenue for the company and its customers… This shows that experienced founders who are interested in solving a big challenge for the world, like climate change, have all the skills they need to make an impact.”

For Cheong, it’s proof that the right mindset — not just scientific expertise — is what moves the needle.

The scale and mechanics of what Cheong attempts here require more than funding or good intentions — they demand a new model for valuing, managing, and rewarding risk. “Creating meaningful long-term value takes time and is not easy. Venture Capital as an industry is famous for announcing big rounds, turning founders into celebrities and glorifying growth at all costs.” 

Yet the kind of growth Cheong pursues has a weight and consequence often absent from the world of software: “The companies we build and invest in have the potential to abate 100MT of carbon dioxide equivalent and be a $100m revenue business at scale… our companies are deploying new technology, financing the deployment of new technology, or significantly changing behaviour.”

Software scale to physical change

This is the hard, granular work of shifting physical systems: “Unlike traditional venture capitals (VCs), which have traditionally focussed on software, many of our companies have a hardware component and the need to operate on the ground and reach scale through software-enabled operational effectiveness.” 

She points to Octayne, a Wavemaker-backed company aiming to tackle one of the region’s most persistent carbon problems: coal. In India and Indonesia, coal remains the dominant source of energy — and, if repurposed, agricultural waste could be the key to cutting emissions at scale. 

“There are established technologies available to turn agricultural waste into a highly efficient carbon neutral fuel,” Cheong explains, “however few established or proven methods to collect, aggregate and transport low-value agricultural waste effectively at scale to turn it into a reliable and predictable fuel source.”

Octayne’s answer has been to set up decentralised production facilities close to the waste sources and industrial clients, building a reliable, localised supply chain where others have struggled.

Wavemaker’s results are already surfacing: sixteen companies built, with six to eight more in the works. “We’re already seeing some early signs of success — two of our earliest companies, Agros, which replaces diesel irrigation pumps with solar irrigation, and Rize, which is decarbonising rice cultivation in Vietnam and Indonesia and backed by Temasek, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and GenZero have raised series A rounds.”

The range is striking — Zentide develops seaweed-based biostimulants to replace chemical fertilisers, Nul leverages AI to tackle fashion waste. At the same time, Arysun and 10Ants stretch the group’s reach into consumer and property technology. 

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Behind these headline numbers, Cheong is most proud of the people. Over the last three years, Cheong has hired a team of incredible, mission-driven individuals, many of whom left higher-paying jobs in order to make a difference in the fight against climate change.

“Because of our team, we’re able to attract successful and experienced entrepreneurs to join us in a mission of building 100 x 100 companies together.”

Quiet, generational power

Yet Cheong is candid about what still needs fixing. In her view, access to capital in venture circles is often determined more by who you know and how you sell than by merit — and unconscious bias runs deep. She notes that women founders are still asked more “risk-based” questions than their male counterparts and consistently raise less per round, despite data showing they deliver more substantial returns per dollar invested.

“This is not surprising given that the majority of VC firms do not have a single woman general partner,” she adds, underscoring just how far the industry has to go.

She is, by her admission, still unlearning what it means to lead at this scale. As Wavemaker Impact matures and prepares to raise a second fund, Cheong finds her role shifting — from hands-on builder to strategic architect, allocating resources on longer horizons and acting on early, often ambiguous signals.

It’s a new discipline, one she describes as “a positive marker of growth and organisation development,” even as it requires a mindset that’s far less about immediate wins and more about setting a direction that others can follow.

Her eyes are fixed, always, on the horizon. “We are part way through a generational shift in leadership and power. In the 2020s, people in their 30s and 40s will increasingly assume positions of global leadership in government, large multinational corporations, small and medium-sized enterprises, and startups. Generational shifts like this have the power to shape public opinion and culture. I see this as a time of tremendous responsibility and a time for value-based leadership.”

In the end, to be a vanguard — truly, deeply — is to move when the world insists on waiting. Marie Cheong speaks softly, never with a grand flourish, but her ambition is fierce and unmistakable.

“This feels like an opportunity for millennials (which I am) and GenXers to make their mark on the world and pave the way for the next generation of leaders to emerge.” She is building for scale, for permanence, and for a world that dares to imagine value and impact in the same breath. The rest, as she says, is still unfolding.

For more stories on The Peak Power List, visit here.