John Bacon

John Bacon began his career in the 1970's as a clinical and medical research scientist. During the 1980s he was a senior scientist with the Australian Red Cross Blood Transfusion Service and concurrently with an Australian Federal government joint venture for medical development in China. In 1989, John founded a consultancy business which under his ongoing management would evolve into Link Healthcare, a multinational specialist pharmaceutical company operating in 10 countries across the Asia-Pacific-African regions. In 2015 Link Healthcare was acquired in a $220m transaction by the U.K. public company Clinigen. John joined the Clinigen global Board as Non-Executive Director for two years to facilitate a sound merger process and the formation of a stable global platform. During his term the market capitalisation of the group doubled from $800m to $1.6b.

Over the past 16 years John has supported the start-up of eight additional independent companies in Australia, Asia and Europe through his private equity company Budburst Capital. In most cases he has either acted as independent director or taken on an advisory roll. Amongst successful exits is the global complementary medicine company Flordis, a business started by John and a group of colleagues in 2002. He is currently invested and closely involved with the Australian companies EnGeneIC (cancer therapeutics) Nexba (sugar free beverages), VentureCrowd (Crowd funding platform) and Genostics (Cancer diagnostics) and the global specialist vitamin business Apsu. John has also served as Chairman of DebRa Australia, the charity supporting families living with the rare skin disease Epidermolysis bullosa (EB) and Chairman of the Royal Prince Alfred Yacht Club.