Baroness Martha Lane Fox appointed Chairwoman

WeTransfer, the company that makes tools to move ideas, announced it has appointed Baroness Martha Lane Fox to chair its board of directors. Martha co-founded the travel deal website, Lastminute.com, in 1998 before it went public two years later. She also serves as the founder of DotEveryone, a think tank focused on championing responsible technology, and sits on the boards of Twitter and Chanel. Martha was Britain’s Digital Championer from 2009 - 2013 and is recognized globally for her work championing for better nationwide access to the internet and digital literacy.

“We can’t imagine a more passionate and innovative evangelist for our brand than Martha is. This appointment and our recent B Corp Certification, marks a clear path forward.” said Gordon Willoughby, WeTransfer’s CEO. "We believe in accountability for the products and technology we put into the world, and we will strive to push our peers to transform our industry into a more responsible and sustainable one.”

Now, more than ever, WeTransfer is committing to setting the bar for responsible technology companies. This year the company is conducting an audit with DotEveryone that will establish what responsible growth means to WeTransfer, and ensure its platform supports a fair, inclusive and sustainable society.

“WeTransfer is one of the few examples of a company that believes stakeholders, users, employees and society are linked together and that by growing in a responsible way, the company will be more successful.” says Martha Lane Fox. “I’m extremely excited to help the company on this important journey.”

About Martha Lane Fox

Martha founded Doteveryone at her Dimbleby Lecture in 2015 and is the Chair of Trustees. Martha co-founded travel website lastminute.com with Brent Hoberman in 1998, they took it public in 2000 and sold it in 2005. She founded her own charitable foundation, Antigone, in 2007. In 2013, Martha was appointed as a crossbench peer in the House of Lords, and Chancellor of the Open University in 2014. She is a non executive director at the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and a non executive director of Twitter. She also co-founded and chairs LuckyVoice.

About WeTransfer

WeTransfer makes tools to move ideas. Founded in 2009 in Amsterdam as a simple, well-designed file sharing service for the creative community, WeTransfer has grown to include tools that scale across the creative spectrum, including editorial platform WePresent (with 2M monthly readers), mobile app ’Collect by WeTransfer’ (with 4M monthly users), quick slide-making tool Paste® (with 40,000 active teams), immersive sketching tool Paper® (with more than 25M downloads), and the original web platform with 50M monthly users and over a billion files sent each month.

From the beginning, WeTransfer has prioritized bringing “offline” values - trust, transparency, and ethics - online. This means having a responsible data policy and tools that don’t distract people from their creative flow. WeTransfer has pioneered a new means of online advertising, resulting in the platform’s full-page wallpapers, designed by our award-winning in-house creative studio. Advertisers include industry-leading brands like Apple, Saint Laurent, Google, Balenciaga, Samsung, Netflix, Adidas, and Squarespace.

Since its founding, WeTransfer has proudly supported the creative communities and given up to 30% of advertising space to support the arts, donating over 5 billion impressions in 2017. Through our ongoing advertising grant program and content platform, WePresent, we have partnered with hundreds of groundbreaking artists and organizations, including Björk, King Krule, FKA twigs, Ryan McGinley, Ami Vitale, the Nelson Mandela Foundation, the UN Development Program, the World Wildlife Foundation and the Prince Estate. In 2016, WeTransfer launched the world’s first free Masters of the Arts in design thinking with the University of the Underground and Worldwide FM, the global radio station run by legendary BBC DJ Gilles Peterson.

Following a $25 million investment from Highland Europe in 2015, WeTransfer opened a US office in Venice Beach, Los Angeles, to add to the Amsterdam headquarters. In 2018, WeTransfer acquired popular creative apps Paper® and Paste® and expanded its US presence to New York City.