Help us keep saying yes.
Resonator has been saying yes to makers, students and communities since the day we were allowed to open the doors. Help us keep them open.
Resonator has been saying yes to makers, students and communities since the day we were allowed to open the doors. Help us keep them open.
Resonator has never run on grants or donations. It runs on the engineering work we sell from the labs and on the time our team and people from our other companies put in after hours. That has kept the doors open so far, and it has also kept us at the limit. Lately we've been saying "yes" less often than we'd like.
We're looking for friends, partners and clients. You can give, you can sponsor, or you can simply buy what we already do well: a workshop for your team, a day in our space, a prototype. Your support is the bridge that gets the hub to the day it pays for itself.
A monthly donation, a one-off gift, or a student's place in the labs. Your name goes on the wall, and you get to say "that's my hub" and mean it.
Become a friend
Annual sponsorship packages. Our event space for your team's offsites and workshops, your name in the hub, and support for the communities that use it. Or put your name on a lab.
Partner with us
Back a specific thing: a student's year in the labs, the youth robotics team, a training for a school's teachers, an NGO that needs a home.
Support a project
Hire the space, book a workshop for your team, or bring us a prototype or an engineering problem. Buying what we already do well is support too.
Work with usDon't take our word for it. These are some of the people and communities that have worked, met, built, and argued under this roof. Most of them are still around. If you know one of them, ask whether we were there when we said we'd be.
We started building Resonator in December 2016. It took years - a former tobacco factory doesn't turn into labs and studios on its own. We got the permit to open in December 2019, the same month the first news about COVID came in. So we never really opened. Instead, we spent the next months on the Air Collective masks for hospitals, working on adapters and organizing people in a lab that had never had a visitor.
We opened to the public slowly, in the summer of 2022, and carefully - nobody was confident about what came next. What came next was wars, an energy and economy crisis, and then AI moving the ground under everyone's feet. Throughout all of it, we were there. Urban planners had a home to work on a better city. Grassroots movements got off the ground, and we stood next to them when they did. Schools, universities, and their students had learning spaces, electronics, VR, and fabrication labs, sound and podcast studios they could actually use. Communities that had nowhere else to meet met here, and events that wouldn't have happened otherwise happened. And for the people who couldn't come, we started recording what we know and putting it on our YouTube channel, in Bulgarian, for free.
We're happy to have so many good people around us. Resonator became a crossroads for Sofia's people with ideas - brilliant minds, go-getters, ambassadors of change, people with faith in what they're doing. You know them, or some of them. The best validation we can give you is the trust we have in all of them. Ask your friends if we stand by what we say.
Call it a hub paid for in evenings. Every free workshop or hosted NGO is a day the lab isn't earning, and lately that has shown: workshops we didn't have energy to host, projects we had to turn down. That's the honest reason for this page. We want to keep the hub open for the people who need a place to gather and think, for the ones trying to build something, and for the small businesses starting out. And we want to be more available to them, not less.
Let's be realistic: a hub like this needs to pay its own way, and we intend to get there. What we're building towards is a place that stands on its own in a few years, with courses that run regularly, a shop of things you can't find anywhere else, and members who have a say in what happens next. More open days, more students who don't pay for the bench, more room for the communities that have outgrown the one they're in, and more of the free Bulgarian tutorials on YouTube. We're taking it step by step.
Resonator became the kind of place I was looking for myself. I'd like it to stay that way for the people who come after us.
Thank you, from me and from everyone on the Resonator team.
If you've been here, you already know. Pick one of the four ways in, or write to us.