Guy Willner

Guy Willner, is a British entrepreneur with substantial experience in building, operating and investing in businesses, predominantly in the TMT and ICT industries, both in the private and public markets and both in developed and emerging markets.

Mr. Willner is the co-founder Chairman and former CEO of IXcellerate, a datacenter operator in Russia providing co-location and peering services for financial institutions, multinational corporations, international carriers, hyperscale operators and major content operators.

He has also served as the co-founder and Chairman of IXAfrica since 2018 and previously served as the CEO of IXEurope (LSE: IXE) from 1999 to 2007. Mr. Willner founded IXEurope in 1998 and oversaw the company’s growth from a sole datacenter in London to a network of 14 datacenters located in four countries (France, UK, Germany and Switzerland) and eight cities, fueled, inpart, by the company successfully executing eight acquisitions between 2004 and 2006. This rapid expansion resulted in IXEurope winning first place in the 2002 UK Sunday Times Tech Track awards as the fastest growing technology company in the UK, and Mr. Willner was a finalist in the 2003 Ernst and Young UK Entrepreneur of the Year awards. With his team, the company was successfully listed on London’s AIM market (LSE: IXE) in April 2006. That same year, the company received the Queen’s Award for International Trade in recognition of its spectacular growth across Europe. IXEurope’s share price grew by a multiple of 6.4x from April 2006 to September 2007, culminating in IXEurope being purchased by Equinix (NASDAQ: EQIX) for $555 million in September 2007. Following the sale, Mr. Willner remained as the President of Equinix’s European sector through June 2008.

Mr. Willner invested in and joined the board of directors of Teraco Data Environments (South Africa) in 2008, and remained as a shareholder and board member until 2014 when the company was sold to Permira.

In 2018, Mr. Willner founded IXAfrica, a hyperscale datacenter operator in Kenya that is projected to be the largest hyperscale datacenter campus inEast Africa by 2025.

Mr. Willner holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from Oxford Brookes University.