Advisors

Khairil Abdullah

Advisor

Malaysia

Mohd Khairil Abdullah is a veteran leader with extensive experience in venture building, technology investment and advisory. In a career that has spanned more than 30 years, Khairil has led start-ups, technology advisory and venture capital teams in Europe, North America and South East Asia.

Khairil began his career as a management consultant, including a 15-year stint with Bain & Company, Inc. As a consultant, Khairil worked out of Bain’s practice in San Francisco, Munich and Sydney helping clients capture value from emerging technologies. He then spent 10 years at Axiata Group Berhad where as CEO of Axiata Digital, he spearheaded Axiata’s entry into digital businesses and investments. There he led teams to build Boost, a leading fintech in Malaysia that provides mobile wallet, micro-lending and digital banking services. He was also responsible for the founding of ADA, a Softbank invested-company, that is now the largest independent data and AI company in South East Asia.

More recently, Khairil assumed the role of CEO of VEON Ventures, the Corporate Venture Capital arm of Nasdaq-listed, VEON Ltd. There, Khairil managed a portfolio of digital businesses and ventures in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and served on the board of companies in the Netherlands, Ukraine and Pakistan. In his time there he helped the scale-up of several of VEON’s digital ventures, to attract financial investments from leading global VCs. He is currently working on his latest venture, a CleanTech start-up that uses AI to enable the participation of ‘bottom of the pyramid’ consumers in the circular economy. He also spends his time mentoring and advising founders on issues including fund-raising, operational scale-up and innovation.

Khairil holds a B.A. and M.Eng. from the University of Cambridge, UK and an MBA from INSEAD, France.