RAE President John Lazar knighted in New Year Honours

Sir John, a technology pioneer and investor who took up his five-year term as President of the Academy in September 2024, is the first tech entrepreneur to hold the post since the Academy was founded in 1976.

He graduated from Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar with an MSc in Computation and a DPhil in History, following an undergraduate degree in Computer Science at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

Sir John is Chair of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which aims to help young people realise their full potential through the power of computing and digital technologies. Raspberry Pi recently completed a successful IPO of its commercial subsidiary on the London Stock Exchange, cementing an endowment of £500 million to drive an ambitious global strategy.

He is co-founder, General Partner, and a Limited Partner at Enza Capital, which backs founders and teams using technology to solve large and meaningful problems across Africa. He sits on the boards of multiple African technology companies. He previously served as the Chair of What3words and was awarded a CBE for services to engineering in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list in 2016.

He has deep experience of building and managing businesses. He joined Metaswitch Networks in 1987 as a software engineer and became CEO in 2009 and then Chairman in 2015, as the company established its leadership in communications software. He stepped down in 2016 and Metaswitch was acquired by Microsoft in 2020.

Sir John is based in London, and travels across Africa on a regular basis. Beyond engineering, he is passionate about hiking, running, art (his wife is a practising artist), tinkering on his 3D printer and Raspberry Pi, and Arsenal football club.

Elected as a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering in 2011, he has chaired its Enterprise Committee, which supports startups and scaleups across the UK and globally through the Enterprise Hub. As a member of the Education and Skills Committee, he played an active role in developing the programme of study for England’s school Computer Science curriculum. 

He has also served as a judge and mentor for the Africa Prize for Engineering Innovation, which trains and backs early-stage African engineering companies.  He has spent many years working on tech-related non-profit initiatives in Africa, especially supporting “digital blacksmiths” and maker labs. He has been an active angel investor and technology startup mentor in the UK and Africa, with more than 40 pre-seed/seed investments.

He led the programme development for the 2019 Global Grand Challenges Summit Engineering in an unpredictable world, which brought 900 engineers from across the world to London to address the challenges posed by disruptive technologies, climate change and providing resources for a growing world population. The summit, co-sponsored by the UK, US, and Chinese Academies of Engineering, enabled international thought leaders and the next generation of engineers to debate and co-create solutions to some of the world’s most significant problems.

Photo credit: Jason Alden