UK startup veteran and investor Wendy Tan White joins Alphabet’s X as vice president

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’s X (formerly Google 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 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 to Astro Teller, the head of X (or “Captain of Moonshots”). “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’ll also remain a Fellow at LocalGlobe, the seed-stage London VC firm with whom she has eight co-investments.

Tan White led the Open Cosmos Series A for BGF, amongst others. Her more than 30 personal investments, along with her husband Joe White, include Public.io, Whitehat, Cleo, CloudNC, OpenCosmos, Automata, Massless, Q-bot, Streetbees, Accurx 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 Joe White will remain in his current post as general partner at 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 U.K. 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.