Apart from being a veteran VC, Bart is a seasoned and passionate entrepreneur and is renowned for his relentless drive to internationalise companies and help them become successful beyond Europe by conquering the US or Asia. A Dutch native, he has been General Partner at Wellington from 2000 to 2015 and played a significant role in building Wellington from a €50M fund in 1999 to a well established player in the European VC market with some €800M of assets under management.

Over the past 2 decades, Bart has invested and been actively involved with an impressive collection of Deep Tech Technology companies located in Europe and the US. Many have already made the successful leap to the US or are successfully opening up new foreign markets. Investments include Navteq (NASDAQ IPO in 2004: NVT; sold to Nokia in 2007), Meiosys (sold to IBM in 2005), Nawotec (sold to Carl Zeiss in 2005), Q-Layer (sold to Sun Microsystems in 2009), Cavendish Kinetics (sold to Qorvo in 2021) and GLO (merged with Nanosys in 2021). Bart currently serves as Chair for a number of Deep Tech companies including Mantle8 (Natural Hydrogen; Grenoble, France), Glasspoint (direct solar to industrial heat; Germany/US), First Light Fusion (Nuclear Fusion; Oxford, UK), Orbex (Rocket Launcher; Forres, Scotland), Nexwafe (PV wafers; Freiburg, Germany) and Hexagem (high efficiency micro-LEDs; Lund, Sweden).

Bart also co-founded a number of companies including the MRI Centre, now a highly successful chain of private medical diagnostic clinics. He also set up and acted as CEO for ePearle, a pan-European B2B eCommerce start-up.

Bart started his career as a process control system and project engineer with Shell in Norway and then worked at McKinsey, both in the Netherlands and South Africa.

Bart holds an MSc in Applied Physics from Twente University of Technology in the Netherlands and an MBA (with distinction) from INSEAD in France