Willem Van Biljon

Who is Willem Van Biljon?

Willem van Biljon is an entrepreneur and technologist born, raised and educated in South Africa.

Van Biljon graduated from the University of Cape Town with a degree in Computer Science. He held engineering and research positions at LinkData, the Institute for Applied Computer Science and the National Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences.

Van Biljon was at Amazon.com where, along with Chris Pinkham and Christopher Brown led the team that developed Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud. Willem built the business plan for the service and was responsible for product management and marketing for the public cloud service.

Van Biljon co-founded Mosaic Software. Mosaic built the Postilion payment system, the first high-end payment transaction switch for commodity hardware and operating systems. Mosaic's investors included GE and Paul Maritz. The company became one of the top three payment processing software vendors in the world and was sold in 2004 to S1 Corp.

In 2006, van Biljon left Amazon Web Services and later started a venture with Chris Pinkham. The company, Nimbula, is focused on Cloud Computing software and is funded by Sequoia Capital and Accel Partners. In March 2013, Nimbula was acquired by Oracle Corporation.