Most discussions about how to fund a universal basic income start and end in the same place: taxes. Wealth taxes on assets over a threshold, automation taxes charged per worker displaced by software, a sovereign wealth fund built from North Sea revenues or a carbon levy: these are the standard proposals, and they all share the same logic. Redistribution happens through the state, funded by capturing some portion of economic activity before it reaches private hands.
That may well be the right route. It is also not the only one that has been seriously proposed.
A different idea has been gaining attention in co-operative and platform-economy circles: what if some companies simply pledged a share of future profits directly to the communities that helped build them? No tax authority required. No waiting for legislation. Just a contractual commitment, made at the point of founding, that part of what the company earns will go back into a common pool.
MeWeBe is one attempt to build that structure from scratch. This article explains how the model works, what it would take for it to produce meaningful income at scale, and where it sits honestly relative to the bigger UBI debate.
The standard funding debate
Universal basic income means different things in different proposals. The minimum version is a regular unconditional payment to every adult resident, at a level sufficient to cover basic needs without conditions or means-testing. The exact amount varies by proposal; so does the funding source.
The most commonly cited funding routes:
Wealth taxes. A recurring annual tax on net assets above a threshold. Proponents argue this is the most direct way to address concentrated wealth; opponents argue it is technically difficult to implement, politically fragile, and may cause capital flight.
Automation taxes. A levy on companies that use AI or robotics to replace workers. The idea is that if the productivity gains from automation are not flowing to workers through wages, they should be captured another way. The main objection is the difficulty of defining what counts as "automated" work and the potential to slow adoption of useful technology.
Sovereign wealth funds. Capitalised from natural resources, carbon pricing, or public ownership of technology infrastructure. Norway's Government Pension Fund is the most-cited model. The constraint is that few countries have a comparable revenue base to draw on.
Redirecting existing spending. Some proposals argue a UBI could be funded by consolidating existing benefit programmes (housing benefit, tax credits, various in-work payments) and redistributing the total more simply. Critics argue this does not add up at a living-income level without significant additional revenue.
None of these is impossible. All face genuine political and technical obstacles. The shared assumption in every route is that the state is the intermediary: it collects revenue and distributes payments.
A different idea: companies pledge directly
The profit-pledge model starts from a different assumption. Rather than the state capturing a share of private profit and redistributing it, companies voluntarily commit a portion of future profits to a shared pool at the point of founding. The pool is distributed to a defined community: in MeWeBe's case, its members.
This is not a new concept. Employee ownership trusts, profit-sharing schemes, and co-operative structures have existed for more than a century. What makes the current moment interesting is the combination of digital infrastructure, which makes pooling and distributing small amounts cheaply feasible, and the growth of platform communities, which can provide the membership base a pool needs to distribute to.
The core argument for this route is alignment. A company that has made a profit pledge to its community has a built-in constituency for doing well. Members have an interest in the startups succeeding because the model is designed so that success could eventually reach them. The pledge creates a shared stake rather than a transfer.
The core weakness is voluntary uptake. Without a legal requirement, the model depends on enough companies making the commitment. A commitment made before a company is profitable is easy to make and harder to honour at the moment it actually requires payment.
How the MeWeBe model works
MeWeBe's version of this structure operates as follows.
Startups that join the network agree to pledge a share of future profits (the recommended range is 5 to 20%) to a community pool. In exchange, MeWeBe builds and grows their product using AI tooling: either free, as a Grant/Equity Partner (giving up 3 to 7% equity), or as a Funded Build where the founder keeps full ownership.
The community pool is the intended eventual source of distributions to MeWeBe members. Members join free, earn MWB Coins for participation in the platform (through streaks, quests, forum posts, referrals, and backing startups in a fantasy startup league) and accumulate standing in the network.
The roadmap is in three stages. Stage 1, the Game Era, is live now: the platform functions, coins are earned, startups are in the pipeline. Stage 2, Real Startups, is the commitment-gathering phase: startups sign actual pledge agreements and are listed publicly with their percentage. Stage 3, the Payout Era, is when distributions to members start, conditional on network startups generating sustained profits.
MWB Coins have no cash value today. Distributions are a goal, not a promise. Stage 3 is conditional on startup profitability, legal and regulatory approval, and final programme design. These conditions matter and the roadmap states them plainly.
The detail is at mewebe.com/roadmap.
The maths: what would meaningful distributions actually require?
This is where most profit-pledge models, including MeWeBe's, need to be honest.
A meaningful distribution (the kind that resembles even a partial basic income rather than a token payment) requires profitable companies making real payments. "Meaningful" varies by context: £50 a month per member is very different from £500. Either way, the numbers only work at scale if the companies in the network are generating significant profits and the pledge percentages are significant fractions of those profits.
The arithmetic is not complicated, but it does require assumptions. Take a simplified case:
- Ten network startups generating an average of £500,000 in annual profit each
- Average pledge of 10%
- Pool income: £500,000 per year across ten startups
- 5,000 members receiving distributions equally: £100 per member per year, or roughly £8 per month
These are illustrative figures, not MeWeBe projections or targets.
That is not nothing. It is also not a living income. Scaling to something resembling a meaningful supplement (say, £500 per member per month) would require either many more startups, much larger profits, or a much smaller membership base. Probably all three.
This does not make the model wrong. It makes it early. The purpose of Stage 1 is to build the community and prove the platform works. Stage 2 is to populate it with real companies making real pledges. The distributions come after that, and whether they reach a meaningful level depends on how well Stages 1 and 2 go.
What is working so far
Stage 1 is live and functional. Members join, earn MWB Coins, participate in forum discussions, back startups in the league, and accumulate standing. Nine startups are already named in the network: FailForum, Feteb, Everb, eBRBe, SwipeStory, VIPLIMS, MeweApps, MeweMarket, and BaceB. MeWeBe shares its projects and code on GitHub.
The founder pipeline is active. MeWeBe's founder, Aku Beg, has worked on more than 1,000 projects since 1996, and the current model for Grant/Equity and Funded Build partnerships is live at mewebe.com/startup.
What Stage 1 cannot tell you is whether Stage 3 distributions will ever be significant. It can only show that the infrastructure is building in the right direction.
What needs to happen for Stage 3 to work
Several things need to be true simultaneously for the payout era to function:
Startups in the network need to reach profitability. Most early-stage startups do not. The model works if the portfolio succeeds as a whole, not just a single company. That requires enough startups making pledges that even a minority achieving profitability generates meaningful pool income.
Pledge agreements need to be legally enforceable. A pledge made before a company has any revenue is a statement of intent. Stage 2's job is to convert those intentions into actual contracts with defined terms. How that is structured, and how it holds up under the various legal and regulatory frameworks that apply, is a real piece of work.
The distribution model needs to be designed and approved. How distributions are calculated, verified, and paid out at Stage 3 is not yet final. That work happens in Stage 2 alongside the legal framework.
Member count and startup count need to scale together. A large membership with a thin startup portfolio produces tiny distributions. A large portfolio with few members is less of a problem, but both sides of the network need to grow for the model to work.
None of this is unusual for an early-stage model. It is the normal progress from concept to operation. The unusual thing about MeWeBe is the transparency with which it says where it is and what it still needs to do.
Where this fits in the broader UBI debate
The profit-pledge model is not a replacement for tax-funded UBI. The amounts involved (even under optimistic assumptions) are likely to remain a supplement rather than a primary income source for most recipients. If the goal is a full basic income sufficient to live on, that requires a scale of redistribution that private voluntary models are unlikely to match without legislative underpinning.
What the model can do is prove something: that profitable companies are willing to share with broader communities if the mechanism is simple and the community provides value. If that works, it creates an argument and a template for more ambitious versions: either through similar voluntary platforms at greater scale, or through legislation that mandates profit-sharing as a condition of certain kinds of operating licence or public support.
The most likely scenario, if this model succeeds, is that it sits alongside tax-funded UBI rather than replacing it. Members would receive small distributions from network profits, while policy continues to evolve on the larger question. That is not a diminished ambition. A real working model, even at partial scale, is more useful to the debate than another well-argued proposal that never runs.
If you are interested in how the current platform works, mewebe.com/how-it-works covers the coin economy and participation model. The full stage-by-stage roadmap is at mewebe.com/roadmap. For the wider evidence on UBI pilots, see mewebe.com/what-is-ubi.