Richard Wooldridge serves as the Chief Operating Officer at Wellcome Leap, with over 30 years of international leadership experience. His career has been focused on taking early-stage innovation to commercial scale across consumer electronics, UAV aviation, and advanced technology industries. Richard oversees Wellcome Leap’s HR, Legal, Finance, IT, and Commercial Translation functions, and is responsible for overall operational execution.

With a background in industrial engineering and manufacturing, he has built and run complex, internationally distributed organizations. Prior to joining Wellcome Leap, he led global operations at Amazon, managing a team of over 300 across software, hardware, data engineering, and operations to launch ultra-fast, last-mile delivery services in under 60 minutes.

Richard’s experience spans senior leadership roles at Facebook, Google, Motorola, Nokia, Flex, and Barnes & Noble, where he led business planning, strategic sourcing, and product execution globally. During his career, he has overseen 12 Greenfield and 4 Brownfield manufacturing site launches and refits worldwide. He has lived and worked across Australia, Hong Kong, the UK, the U.S., Mexico, Germany, Finland, and Israel, and holds a degree in engineering. Richard is originally from the United Kingdom.