Laetitia de Cayeux is a technology entrepreneur and investor. She is the Founder and Managing Partner of Global Space Ventures, which funds and accelerates frontier technology start-ups to help build a resilient future. She serves on the Defense Science Board of the U.S. Department of Defense, on the NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation Advisory Board, on the board of the National Museum of Mathematics and the XPRIZE Foundation, and on the advisory board of the Truman Center. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Economic Club of New York, and Women Corporate Directors.

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 an early investor in SpaceX, Lynk which demonstrated the first “cell tower in space”, and several other notable US technology champions that have developed and scaled technologies critical to building a more resilient future.  

Her 25-year career in finance has spanned the US, Europe,and Asia and included leadership roles at major global investment firms Renaissance Technologies and TPG-Axon, serving as an investment banker at Goldman Sachs where she started her career in 1999, and starting her own investment firm. 

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. 

Laetitia 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. She has an extensive record of TV and print media appearances in the US and France, on technology, innovation, foreign policy, national security, and the economy. 

An American by choice, Laetitia lived and worked in China and the UK for several years, and is a native French speaker. She holds an MBA from both ESSEC and Harvard Business School where she was a recipient of the Harvard Business School Consuelo Balsan fellowship.  

Laetitia fell in love with impact through innovation in 1995, when selected to represent her native country of France at the Global Information Infrastructure Junior Summit in Tokyo. The European Commission hosted a G7 roundtable on the emerging Global Information Society, and youth were invited to help illuminate opportunities that the rise of the World Wide Web could provide. Through her participation in the GII Junior Summit, Laetitia understood early on and has remained all these years a big fan of moonshots and leveraging the power of competitions as a way to inspire, catalyze innovation, and accelerate more hopeful futures.