Real Business

Champion

Wendy Tan White, founder & CMO; Joe White, CEO Moonfruit, London W1W 8EA

Profile

Wendy Tan White is an entrepreneur, technologist and designer. She is the founder of fast growth website-building software company Moonfruit, which has just raised $2.25m from Stephens.

Moonfruit was founded in the UK in 1999 and over 2.8 millon websites have been built using its software. Over the last year, it has seen significant growth both in the UK and internationally. A successful Twitter marketing campaign led to a 20% increase in new subscriptions per month, with the bulk of them coming from the US. Now, 26% of Moonfruit’s customers are in the USA, 49% are in the UK, with the remaining 25% scattered around the rest of the world.

“We have been profitable for seven years, have hundreds of thousands of customers, and have multi-million dollar sales. But the self-publishing market is only just starting to gather serious momentum, and we want to accelerate our growth,” explains Wendy Tan White, founder and CMO of Moonfruit.  “Since the dotcom crash in 2000 we have focused on being a boot-strapped, profitable business, but we think the time is right now for a calculated risk to take the business to the next level.”

Over the last year, Moonfruit has laid the infrastructure to quickly scale around the world. It partnered with Edgecast to put all of its tools and websites on a content delivery network (CDN), which means that North American and Far Eastern users experience the same service as European customers. As a result, the majority of the funding will be put towards sales and marketing to acquire new customers around the world.

Joe White, CEO of Moonfruit, says, “Stephens, takes a long term view of all their investments and have been very supportive for several years. We’re very pleased they can see the potential of our new direction and are providing the first injection of growth funding.”

Moonfruit is designed for consumers and SMEs who may not have web design experience, but want to build beautiful websites. The Adobe Flash environment allows true drag and drop, point and click editing to layer, crop, animate, and colour objects on your page. It provides basic ecommerce tools for SMEs, the ability to add HTML widgets and social media tools, and all sites are rendered in Flash and HTML for smart phones.

Wendy Tan White also serves as marketing director for internet services provider Gandi Group which includes www.moonfruit.com <http://www.moonfruit.com> and sister company www.gandi.net <http://www.gandi.net> , a leading European, ethical domain name registrar and cloud hosting provider, turnover €20m.

Her first degree in Computer Science from Imperial College and training with Arthur Andersen led her to a rewarding career in tech and finance. She was in the start-up team which set up www.egg.com <http://www.egg.com>  in 1997, the world’s first Internet bank. She founded www.moonfruit.com <http://www.moonfruit.com>  in 1999, DIY website-building software, for building ‘Beautiful websites, simply’.  Two million-plus websites have been built to date with the award winning software. As CEO, she raised significant venture capital from Bain, Macromedia and LVMH. Moonfruit was sold to Gandi Group in 2005, the group’s investors are US private investment bank, Stephens Inc.

Wendy was also part of the original team who set-up ground-breaking www.zopa.com <http://www.zopa.com> in 2004, the first European peer to peer lending website and as part of the ‘Gandi Supports’ programme, provides advice and hosting to the award winning, market disruptive, citizen journalist site www.demotix.com <http://www.demotix.com>  started in 2007.

Wendy is on the investment panel of Mobius Lifescience Fund and advisor for digital agency Project Metal part of the Next Fifteen communications group.

Wendy also has an MA in Future Textiles from Central St. Martins and loves smart, sustainable materials and design. She lives with her husband Joe White and two children in West London.