Sir John Lazar
Sir John Lazar is co-founder and general partner at Enza Capital, Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and President of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering.
In 2019, with two partners he co-launched Enza Capital which backs founders and teams using technology to solve large and meaningful problems across Africa. Headquartered in Nairobi, Enza has invested in more than 35 African tech companies to date. Sir John sits on the board of three of Enza’s portfolio companies.
He has served as Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation since 2020. In June 2024, the Foundation’s commercial subsidiary, Raspberry Pi Holdings, listed successfully on the London Stock Exchange, crystalising an endowment of more than £600m to drive the Foundation’s global mission to enable all young people to realise their full potential through computing and AI.
He is a Fellow of the UK’s Royal Academy of Engineering, and a Fellow of BCS, the UK’s chartered institute for IT. Until his election as President of the Academy in September 2024, he served as chair of the Academy’s Enterprise Committee which oversees the activities of its Enterprise Hub, supporting start-ups and scale-ups across the UK and globally. For the past eight years, he has also been a judge and mentor on the Academy’s Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which backs 15-20 early-stage African engineering companies annually. He has also spent many years working on tech-related non-profit initiatives in Africa, especially building “digital blacksmiths” and maker labs.
Sir John has also been an active angel investor and technology start-up mentor in the UK and Africa, with more than 40 individual pre-seed/seed investments.
In 2016, he stepped down as Chairman and CEO of Metaswitch Networks. He joined the company in 1987 as a software engineer and became Chief Executive Officer, and then Chairman, as the company established its leadership in cloud communications software. Metaswitch was acquired by Microsoft in 2020.
He graduated from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar with an M.Sc in Computation and a D.Phil in History, following an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
He was awarded a Knighthood for services to Engineering and Technology in the King’s New Years Honours 2025 and a CBE for services to Engineering in 2016.
