Eileen Burbidge is a Partner at Passion Capital, the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. She brings extensive operational experience to her investment activities gleaned from business and product roles at Yahoo!, Skype, Apple and elsewhere. On behalf of Passion, Eileen serves as non-executive director on a number of fast growing SMEs including Monzo Bank, Digital Shadows, Marshmallow and Butternut Box among others.
Burbidge started her career in Silicon Valley, working for some of the world’s most prestigious tech companies, including Apple, Yahoo!, and Sun Microsystems. In 2004 she moved to London to become one of Skype’s earliest employees. In 2011, as a founding partner of Passion Capital, Burbidge was part of the team that built the pre-eminent early-stage technology venture fund based in London. At Passion, she serves as board director for Digital Shadows, Focal Point Positioning, Prowler.IO, Butternut Box and other portfolio companies.
Eileen Burbidge is also a member of the board of Dixons Carphone, the FTSE 250-listed consumer electronics retailer. Eileen was awarded an MBE in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to Business. She also holds a BSc Engineering degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Burbidge was also formerly chair of financial technology start-up Tide, one of the first digital-only finance platforms in the UK to provide current accounts for businesses, and an early investor and director at consumer challenger bank Monzo; where she is now Board Director.
In 2018, Dixons Carphone appointed Burbidge as an independent non-executive director of the Board and a member of the Audit Committee, and she joined the Transformation & Innovation Advisory Board for UniCredit in early 2019.
In addition to Passion Capital, and as described by Fortune Magazine as “The Queen of British VC”, Eileen Burbidge is one of the UK’s biggest Tech personalities and one of London’s most influential venture capitalists. She is the UK Treasury’s Special Envoy for Fintech, appointed by the Chancellor; Tech Ambassador for the Mayor of London’s office and served on former UK Prime Minister David Cameron’s Business Advisory Group as well as Chair of Tech Nation for 5 years, stepping down in 2020.
