Born in 1964 and graduated as aerospace engineer from Centrale Paris, Charles Beigbeder began his career in 1989 in the Matra Group (Airbus). After this first experience in the aerospace industry, he turned to investment banking in the 1990s, working for Banque Paribas and Crédit Suisse First Boston in Paris and London.    

In 1997, he founded Self Trade, a pioneer in Internet brokerage in France and Europe, later sold to Boursorama.    

Taking advantage of the deregulation of the energy market, he created Poweo in 2002, an independent electricity and gas supplier, which became an integrated energy operator, building g two gas-fired power plant in north and east of France. Poweo is now part of Total Energies.    

For the past ten years, he has been investing in early stage through Gravitation, his industrial and financial holding company, which creates, initiates and supports new entrepreneurial ventures in the fields of energy, mobility, media and new technologies.    

He also manages Audacia, an AMF management company founded in 2006, which has become a leader in growth capital by providing quasi-equity for French SMEs, also active in innovation capital and real estate financing dedicated to coliving.   

 Driven by a strong interest in quantum physics and anticipating a strong demand for investments when the second generation of quantum technologies arrives on the market, he launched in 2018 at Audacia the Quantonation venture capital fund dedicated to Deep Tech startups developing quantum technologies. To date, the fund has invested in more than 20 startups and made a final closing of 91 million in June 2022.    

Since April 2022, the Expansion, Aerospace and Defense fund has been created, and started to deploy capital.   And is working on the creation of a fund dedicated to the energy transition.   Charles Beigbeder has been involved in several movements related to business and community life. He has been President of the CroissancePlus association, a group of high-growth companies, and a member of the Executive Council and President of the Entrepreneurship Commission of MEDEF.    

Charles Beigbeder is the author of five books: Positive Energy, published in 2008 (Editions du Toucan), Is the energy crisis an opportunity for the future? published in 2009 (Jean-Claude Lattès), Since it's impossible, let's do it, published in 2012 (Jean-Claude Lattès), Thank you, bosses! published by Librio (Flammarion) in 2015 and Charnellement de France published by Pierre-Guillaume de Roux in 2016.