British Growth Fund picks first female partner in start-up hunt
ONE of the UK’s top female tech entrepreneurs is to join BGF
Ventures as the venture-capital firm looks to unearth start-up gems for its £200 million fund.
Wendy Tan White, who sold her website building company Moonfruit to Yell Group in 2012 for $37 million (£29 million), is leaving start-up accelerator Entrepreneur First in September to become a partner at BGF, whose fund is the largest dedicated to early-stage tech companies.
Her husband Joe White will remain at Entrepreneur First.
Tan White, who is also a director of Tech City UK, is a prominent angel investor, backing companies such as Magic Pony, the machine-learning start-up which was sold to Twitter last year for $150 million.
She will become BGF Ventures’ first female partner. Among its three partners is Simon Calver, the former chief executive of LoveFilm and Mothercare.
“Venture-capital firms are looking for outliers and to find an outlier you need different modes of thinking,” Tan White said.
“Having different thinking, whether it’s nationality, age, gender, and experience, is important. Having both men and women in a team creates that diversity to get an outlier. I think that’s got to be a good thing.”
BGF Ventures was set up two years ago as the tech start-up investing arm of the British Growth Fund, an SME investment firm backed by banking heavyweights Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Chartered.
It has spent almost £50 million of the fund in two years, investing in 18 companies including recipe-kit start-up Gousto.
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