Hong Kong Funding & Competition Finder

Discover fundraising opportunities, business case competitions, startup pitches, awards and trading competitions relevant to Hong Kong. The default live mode fetches selected official websites during each run, follows relevant links, and returns structured records with source URLs and retrieval timestamps.

This is a bounded discovery tool, not a complete search of every Hong Kong website. It does not confirm that applications are open or that a person qualifies. Missing dates and eligibility details remain unknown. It does not return historical winners or submit applications.

What you receive

Each dataset row includes a title, opportunity type, organizer, official URL, description excerpt, eligibility and award excerpts when found, deadline wording, source ID, retrieval time, and extraction status. JSON and CSV exports are available through Apify datasets.

The SUMMARY key-value record reports matching and returned counts, source failures, partial coverage, pagination, and whether the spending limit stopped output. An empty filtered result is legitimate. If every selected source fails, the run fails explicitly; it does not substitute old catalogue records.

Example input

{
  "mode": "live",
  "sources": ["hku-tec", "hkstp", "cyberport", "hkgcc", "cityu", "hksec"],
  "types": ["fundraising", "business", "entrepreneurship"],
  "includePast": false,
  "maxPages": 24,
  "limit": 100
}

Use q: "business case" to narrow the extracted results. All search words must match somewhere in a record. An empty types or sources array selects all supported values. Search takes place after the bounded crawl; a narrow query can return zero even when other opportunities were found.

Official sources

Source ID	Coverage
hku-tec	HKU TEC competition event listings and linked event pages
hkstp	HKSTP programme index and relevant programme pages
cyberport	Cyberport entrepreneurship programmes
hkgcc	The configured HKGCC business case competition edition page
cityu	CityUHK Tech 300 seed and angel funding pages discovered from its index
hksec	Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge programme page

Coverage is limited to these configured sites and paths. In particular, the HKGCC seed is an edition-specific page and needs maintenance when a new edition URL is announced. Trading is a supported output/filter category, but these initial sources do not promise comprehensive trading coverage. Official websites can change, block automated requests, or require browser rendering. The Actor respects robots.txt and reports failures; it does not bypass access restrictions.

Input and deadline semantics

• mode: live by default; catalogue explicitly searches the maintained FundXplore website snapshot instead.
• maxPages: 6–60 HTML requests, default 24, divided among selected sources. robots.txt requests are additional. Live runs have a 45-second source budget.
• types: fundraising, business, entrepreneurship, trading. These are broad categories; programmes and awards are not necessarily competitions.
• q, location, category: optional text/category filters. Location is source context, not a guarantee about applicant eligibility.
• includePast: false by default. Excludes extracted or listed dates known to be before today in Hong Kong; it cannot exclude all closed opportunities because many deadlines remain unknown.
• deadlineFrom, deadlineTo: inclusive YYYY-MM-DD bounds. Undated records are excluded when these are used.
• limit: 1–1,000 returned records, default 100. offset: skip matching records. sort: deadline or title.

Only an unambiguous ISO date in labelled live deadline text is normalized in this version. Other wording is preserved in deadlineText. No year, timezone, deadline or funding amount is invented. Live rows have verificationStatus: automatically-extracted-review-required; fetching a source is not editorial verification. Automated type classification and organizer attribution use source context and can require correction.

Catalogue rows retain the website's listed milestone date and may include an early, institutional or batch cutoff. review-required prevents known ambiguous multi-stage listings from being treated as definitively closed. lastVerifiedAt remains null where individual verification evidence is unavailable.

Pricing and spending limits

The Actor supports one opportunity-result pay-per-event charge for each newly exported row. The displayed Apify pricing determines the actual price. No custom charge is made for failed pages, filtered-out records, or an empty result. Maximum results and Apify's maximum run charge both bound output. Platform usage charges, if enabled by the publisher, are shown separately in Apify pricing.

Rows already present in the same run's default dataset are skipped when resuming. A new run performs fresh retrieval and produces a new billable export; it is not a change-only subscription. For a stable paginated export, page through the completed dataset rather than launching a separate live run for each offset.

Freshness and limits

Live output records the actual retrieval time and evidence excerpts. It does not scrape arbitrary user-supplied URLs, run AI prompts found in pages, parse attached PDFs, render JavaScript-heavy pages, assess personal eligibility, or promise funding outcomes. Check linked official terms before applying. Catalogue mode is a build-time snapshot and is updated when the publisher updates the source records and rebuilds the Actor.

Use Apify schedules if you want repeated live discovery. This Actor outputs datasets; it does not itself email deadline reminders.