Matei MIHALCA

My background is in finance. Over some 25 years, I worked in New York City, Hong Kong, and Tokyo at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, AQR Capital and other firms in both buy-side and sell-side roles. I now lead Forward Partners, a firm I created with several distinguished researchers to apply a scientific approach to the systematic prediction of valuable technological innovation and associated firms. We both provide advice and seek to invest capital.

In terms of my personal biography, I was born in Romania and had the opportunity to study as an exchange student in China in the 1990s, witnessing the country's economic transformation first-hand, and then to study China and contemporary Asia as a PhD student at Harvard University.

I left academia to become the Taiwan semiconductor analyst at Merrill Lynch in 1997, witnessing the rise of contract semiconductor manufacturing and IC design. My interest in and vision for technology is inspired by what I learned in those years. We want Forward Partners to identify breakthrough technologies and to fund them ourselves or in partnership with others. We undertake the identification process, for both technologies and firms, on a systematic quantitative basis, taking advantage of Machine Learning and network science.