Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Global Space Ventures
Laetitia Garriott de Cayeux is a technology entrepreneur and investor. She is the Founder/CEO of Global Space Ventures. She serves on NATO Maritime Unmanned Systems Innovation Advisory Board; on the board of directors of XPRIZE, which launched on Earth Day the $100M Carbon Removal XPRIZE with Elon Musk; on the board 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. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the Economic Club of New York, and Women Corporate Directors. Her 25 years 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 including AI, biotech, and space. She was instrumental in beamed energy technology becoming onboarded to NASA’s technology roadmap, as cofounder 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 US technology champions SpaceX, AI leader SparkCognition, iXpressGenes which won a Department of Defense innovation contract to seek antibiotics to protect soldiers from biowarfare agents, and Lynk, which demonstrated the first “cell tower in space” and is working on bridging the connectivity gap for rural America and beyond.
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.
She dedicates much of her time to foreign policy 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 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 also been actively involved on the political front, including with both the Biden/Harris and Clinton/Kaine presidential campaigns. She served on the National Finance Committee for both presidential campaigns, including as Co-Chair of Innovators for Biden, Women for Biden, Asian American and Pacific Islanders for Biden, and the African American Leadership Finance Council (and raising directly as a full-time volunteer approximately $6.5M in support of the Biden/Harris campaign), and as Co-Founder of “Entrepreneurs for Hillary” (a diverse coalition which raised over $8 million in support of the Clinton/Kaine campaign).
She is a recipient of several awards including 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.
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. She has lived and worked in France, China and the UK, and is a native French speaker. She is married to Richard Garriott de Cayeux, the first second-generation American Astronaut, the first explorer to have explored the Earth pole to pole, orbited the Earth, and reached the deepest point in our Oceans, and the videogame pioneer behind massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). They have two children, Kinga Shuilong (9y) and Ronin Phi (7y). She is also the granddaughter of French scientist André de Cayeux de Sénarpont, whom the Cailleux crater on the moon is named after.
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