Laetitia de Cayeux
Ms. Laetitia de Cayeux is a technology entrepreneur and investor. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Global Space Ventures, which funds and accelerates dual-use critical technology start-ups across AI, biotech, space, and beyond. She serves on the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation Advisory Board; on the board of directors of XPRIZE, which has launched large incentive competitions leveraging technology to solve grand challenges, such as the $100M Carbon Removal XPRIZE launched in partnership with Elon Musk; on the board and as strategic planning committee chair of the National Museum of Mathematics; and as a security fellow of the Truman National Security Project, and advisory board member of the Truman Center for National Policy. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Economic Club of New York, and Women Corporate Directors. Her 25-year career has spanned the US, Europe, and Asia. She is passionate about building better futures at scale and advancing national security including STEM and innovation.
Her entrepreneurial and investing activities have been focused on frontier technologies. She was instrumental in meaningful advances in beamed energy technology, and its onboarding to NASA’s technology roadmap, as co-founder and President/COO of Escape Dynamics, which Fast Company ranked third of the “Top 10 World’s Most Innovative Space Companies”, and whose technology was featured in Scientific American as a “World Changing Idea”. She is also an early investor in SpaceX and several other US technology champions that have scaled dual-use technologies that are critical to national security, and become unicorns. Her finance career has spanned diverse sectors including technology, energy, chemicals, hotel/gaming, and consumer/retail. In addition to starting her own investment firm, she held leadership roles at major global investment firms Renaissance Technologies and TPG-Axon, worked at Goldman Sachs in Europe on cross-border merger and acquisition transactions involving US, European, and Chinese state-owned companies, and at Paribas in China on Asian equity mandates.
A leading voice in innovation and national security, she has contributed to Council on Foreign Relations study groups on transformative technologies and US Policy towards Asia, presided over policy discussions on topics ranging from Space Force to US national security and US-China relations, and briefed members of the Senate on commercial space and national security. She has been published by the Atlantic Council, in Forbes, Huffington Post, Techonomy, and the Truman National Security Project, on foreign policy and technology matters ranging from tech diplomacy and US-China relations to North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, transatlantic relations, US-France relations, and national security space. She also has an extensive record of TV and print media appearances on technology, innovation, foreign policy, national security, and the economy. She is a recipient of numerous awards including the inaugural ESSEC Alumni USA Visionary Award, Vanity Fair France’s 50 Most Influential in the World and 15 Most Influential Entrepreneurs (2016), Institutional Investor’s rising star award (2010), the Women Forum for the Economy and Society’s rising talent award (2010), and Harvard Business School’s business plan competition top award (2004) for launching the first human egg-freezing US technology company.
Laetitia is an American by choice. She started full time work at age 21, then put herself through a Harvard Business School MBA on student loan, where she was also a recipient of the Harvard Business School Consuelo Balsan fellowship. She has lived and worked in France, China and the UK, and is a native French speaker.