Wendy Tan White, a veteran of the U.K. startup scene — including founding SaaS website builder Moonfruit, which exited to Yell Group for $37 million — is joining Alphabet X, TechCrunch has learned.
According to sources, Tan White was approached by Google late last year, as she weighed up a number of other options, including raising a VC fund of her own dedicated to “deep tech”. Ultimately, she’s decided to join Google X, where she’ll hold the position of Vice President and will be part of the leadership team.
I understand she’ll be reporting directly Astro Teller, the head of X. “She will be managing, mentoring and supporting a range of teams across X,” a source tells me.
As well as founding and exiting Moonfruit with her husband Joe, Tan White has recently been a very active investor in the U.K., both in a personal capacity and as former Partner at BGF Ventures, the early-stage U.K. venture capital fund where she remains an advisor.
She led the Open Cosmos Series A for BGF, amongst others. Tan White’s over 30 personal investments include Public.io, Whitehat, Cleo, CloudNC, OpenCosmos, Automata, Massless, Q-bot, Streetbees, and Xihelm.
Prior to BGF, she was a General Partner at Entrepreneur First, the London-headquartered deep tech company builder, which is backed by Greylock, and remains a popular figure amongst EF alumni.
(I’m told husband Joe Tan White will remain in his current post as COO of Entrepreneur First, and, along with Wendy, will be based in the U.S., where he already spends much of his time.)
Wendy Tan White is also a Board Trustee of the Alan Turing Institute (the U.K.’s National AI Institute), a Member of the UK Digital Economy Council, on the Board of TechNation and Imperial College, DoC. She was awarded an MBE for services to business and technology in 2016 and Women in IT, Business Role Model of the Year 2017.