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Mingpo Cai’s journey started at age 20 when he arrived in France with no capital, no network and not a word of French. Today, he’s the founder of Cathay Capital and an influential figure in Sino-French economic relations.

It’s through pure determination and believing that sincerity is the universal language, that Mingpo made his way from China to France, taught himself the language and worked his way through business school.

Mingpo started his first company Stonest to transform the archaic gravestone industry and learned life-long lessons around the value of trust and simply doing what you say. He developed relationships early in his academic years, leading him to open a representative office in Shanghai for France’s Groupe SEB, now an active investor in Cathay Capital.

When he met tenured French private equity investor Edouard Moinet, they bonded immediately over the idea of bridging economic cultures. The two started Cathay Capital and built a global investment platform, with an impressive ecosystem of corporate LPs, to share knowledge and local expertise to help companies go beyond their borders.

It’s when Mingpo moved to New York that he met Denis Barrier, the French venture capitalist living in Silicon Valley who shared the same vision in a global ecosystem that would be useful to entrepreneurs and corporate executives alike. Together, they infused venture into Cathay Capital to push forward digital transformation and scale technologies that will have a positive impact on the world.

Denis Barrier’s journey came to a point when he, a French venture capitalist and technologist living in Silicon Valley, met Mingpo Cai, a Chinese serial entrepreneur living in New York who had founded Cathay Capital in Paris.

It was in this environme nt that they discovered a shared vision: a global platform that unifies investment to push forward digital revolution and help entrepreneurs scale technologies that will fundamentally change the world.

Denis holds a Ph.D. in solid state physics and started his career in the laboratories of Orange Telecom researching quantum dots. Driven by the desire to help peer researchers apply their findings in the real world through entrepreneurship, he entered venture capital and eventually became head of Orange’s investment arm.

Denis is considered an innovator in his field by working with Orange and Publicis to create one of the first funds bringing two leading corporations together. Upon relocating to San Francisco with his wife and three children to manage the fund’s international activities, he became convinced that the most successful innovations don’t happen in silos — even in the startup world.

Firmly believing that the future lies in the platformization of venture capital, including corporates, Denis joined forces with Mingpo and founded Cathay Innovation with a new approach. One that emphasizes collaboration and knowledge sharing across geographies, industries and the entire innovation ecosystem – under the conviction that technology at scale is key to a more sustainable economy.