John Taysom

John Taysom is a British technology investor and entrepreneur. He holds a BSc in Economics (Hons) from the University of Bath, and spent the core of his early career at Reuters from the early 1980s to the early 2000s, progressing through product, strategy and venture-investing roles across Hong Kong, the Middle East, Europe and the United States. His work centered on delivering data, video and transaction services over private, wireless and internet networks.

In 1995 Taysom founded the Reuters Venture Capital Fund — better known as the Reuters Greenhouse Fund — in Palo Alto, California. As Managing Partner he deployed capital across roughly 82 internet and web-infrastructure investments, including foundational names such as Yahoo!, Verisign, Infoseek, Phone.com, Digimarc, UltraDNS and Intertrust; the portfolio ultimately produced around 18 IPOs. In 2001–2002 he acquired the fund from Reuters through a management buyout.

In 2011–2012 Taysom took a Senior Fellowship at Harvard's Advanced Leadership Initiative, where he worked on online privacy, and he holds US and European patents on methods for anonymizing user data (notably for advertising purposes). Building on that work, in 2016 he co-founded Privitar, a London-based enterprise data-privacy software company that lets organizations mine sensitive datasets while protecting the individuals within them. Privitar was acquired by Informatica in 2023; Taysom has served as a co-founder and non-executive director.

Alongside investing, Taysom has held a range of academic and governance roles: Policy Fellow at the University of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, Visiting Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UCL, board member and trustee of The Web Science Trust, founding director (now emeritus) of ITEGA (the Information Trust Exchange Governing Association), and Governor of Hurstpierpoint College. He has also chaired Performance Horizon Group and served as a director of Forbes.com.

• Invests as an angel at seed and early stage, backing UK and US technology startups; over time he has held shares in ~30 private tech businesses.
• Strong conviction around data, privacy and data rights — the intersection of AI, cybersecurity and who controls personal data — reflecting his patents, his Harvard privacy fellowship and his founding of Privitar.
• Favors companies in internet/web infrastructure, enterprise data software, analytics/machine learning, and adtech/marketing technology, mirroring the categories he backed at the Reuters Greenhouse Fund.
• Brings a corporate-venture and operator perspective: decades of building and buying a venture fund inside a large information company, plus hands-on founder experience with Privitar.
• Track record of exits via strategic acquirers — portfolio companies have been acquired by the likes of Experian, LinkedIn, Tesco and BMC, and at least one has reached IPO.