Royal Academy of Engineering President John Lazar knighted

07 April, 2025

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 £500M 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

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