Our Board

Apart from being a veteran VC, Bart is a seasoned and passionate entrepreneur and is renowned for his relentless drive to internationalise companies and help them become successful beyond Europe by conquering the US or Asia. A Dutch native, he has been a General Partner at Wellington from 2000 to 2015 and played a significant role in building Wellington from a €50M fund in 1999 to a well established player in the European VC market with some €800M of assets under management.

Over the past 2 decades, Bart has invested in an impressive collection of deep IP Technology companies located in Europe and the US. Many have already made the successful leap to the US or are successfully opening up new foreign markets. Investments include Navteq (NASDAQ IPO in 2004: NVT; sold to Nokia in 2007), Meiosys (sold to IBM in 2005), Nawotec (sold to Carl Zeiss in 2005), Q-Layer (sold to Sun Microsystems in 2009), Cavendish Kinetics and GLO.

Bart spent the past 18 years as an investor in High Tech companies, and additionally as a serial entrepreneur himself co-founded by now 6 companies including Hexagem, a defect-free GaN substrate technology company and the MRI Centre, a highly successful chain of private medical diagnostic clinics. He also set up and acted as CEO for ePearle, a pan-European B2B eCommerce start-up.

Bart started his career as a process control system and project engineer with Shell in Norway and then worked at McKinsey, both in the Netherlands and South Africa.

Bart holds an MSc in Applied Physics from Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands and an MBA (with distinction) from INSEAD in France.

Andreas Lusch is an experienced global leader with deep domain expertise in the oil & gas and energy industry. He is the former President & CEO of GE Steam Power, a 4.5 billion USD global business covering the industry’s widest range of technologies for nuclear and coal applications as well as environmental control systems, from product development to turnkey power plant solutions.

Prior to joining GE, he was the senior vice president of Alstom Thermal Power’s Steam and Nuclear businesses, where he had global responsibility for Alstom’s steam and nuclear portfolios. In this role, he led the integration of Alstom Power products into power plants through engineering, procurement and construction services. Andreas started his career in 1987 in the engineering and construction division of the ThyssenKrupp Group where he held leadership roles in the oil, gas, petrochemical and coal industries.

From 2000 to 2005 Andreas was in the executive board of Lurgi AG, a technology and EPC company active in the field of oil & gas, petrochemicals and life sciences. He holds a degree in chemical engineering from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany.

Robert is the Head of Cleantech at IP Group plc, a £1bn venture capital firm that backs scientific breakthroughs with permanent capital from the public markets. Over the last decade IP Group has been the most active venture investor in climate technology startups in the UK, with over 40 investments to date and notable successes including Ceres Power, First Light Fusion and Oxbotica. Outside cleantech, Robert also led IP Group’s investment in Hinge Health, a $6bn pioneer in digital treatment for back and joint pain.

Prior to IP Group, he was Head of R&D at The Carbon Trust, where he led their Research Accelerator programme and R&D grant funding portfolio. He started his career as a scientist working in hydrogen and fuel cells before joining McKinsey to consult in the energy and materials sectors. He has a First Class degree and PhD in materials science from the University of Cambridge.

In addition to his work at IP Group, Robert serves as a Commissioner for the Energy Transitions Commission, a diverse, global group of leaders from industry, finance and public life who are working to accelerate the transition to zero-carbon energy, industry and transport. Robert was also a member of the UK Government Green Finance Taskforce and advises the UK government and other stakeholders on the development of a thriving green finance industry in the UK.

Yiannis Ventikos is the Kennedy Professor of Mechanical Engineering and the Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department at University College London. He has worked or studied in Greece, France, the USA and Switzerland. He is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering.

Prof Ventikos established the Fluidics and Biocomplexity Group in 2003, that pursues research on transport phenomena and fluid mechanics, with a variety of applications, including energy, healthcare and manufacturing. He has published about 150 papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals, has contributed chapters in 10 books, and has presented close to 400 papers in international conferences and workshops. He has filed nine international patents to date. Apart from being a co-founder of First Light Fusion, he has been involved in a number of other tech transfer enterprises and consults internationally on topics of his expertise. He has served as a reviewer for more than 80 academic journals as well as for textbook and monograph publishers. He is on the editorial board of six academic journals, and on the scientific and/or organising committee of numerous international conferences and workshops.