Simon Waddington

Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Simon D. Waddington is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Burrill. He is involved in building startup companies across Burrill & Company’s sectors of interest and coordinates Burrill’s global team to conceptualize and build regional newcos in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East/Africa. He serves as the CEO of Abunda, a Burrill incubated startup.

Prior to Burrill, he spent more than a decade as a venture capitalist. He was a Managing Partner at PolyTechnos Venture-Partners based in Munich, Germany where he led and supported investments for numerous life science and materials-related companies across Europe, Israel, and the United States. Prior to that, he started and ran Monsanto’s European corporate venturing activities from Brussels, Belgium, covering opportunities across the medical, agricultural, nutrition, healthcare services and materials arenas. Before that he was Product Development Manager in the United Kingdom for Zeneca’s biopolymers business, which pioneered the fermentation-based production of biodegradable polymers from renewable feedstocks. Prior to that he served as a Senior Research Scientist for ICI specializing in surface and interface science: his work on the development and advancement of surface analysis methods led to a long-standing interest in nanoscience and he was a co-founder of the European NanoBusiness Association and served on its Advisory Board.

His investment activities have broadly spanned the physical, chemical, and biological sectors and as such he has developed a keen interest in business requiring an interdisciplinary context such as medical devices. His functional roles in industry have included corporate venturing, business development and strategy, product development, applied science, and basic research. He has worked in the United Kingom, United States, Belgium and Germany. He holds a Ph.D. in physics and an MBA from Harvard Business School.