Michael “Mike” Calvey is an American investor and entrepreneur based in Europe. An innovation enthusiast with three decades of experience across a range of industries, notably in fintech, he is currently chairman of Baring Ventures, a private equity group with long-term stakes in Kaspi, Revolut, and Plata.
He is the author of a memoir about his nearly three decades working and living in Russia, Odyssey Moscow: One American's Journey From Russia Optimist to Prisoner of the State (2025).
Born in 1967 in Wisconsin and raised in Oklahoma, Calvey studied computer science and business at the University of Oklahoma and finance at the London School of Economics. He started his professional career in 1989 as an investment banking analyst at Salomon Brothers in New York, where he focused on capital markets and M&A transactions in the U.S. energy industry.
From 1991 to 1994, Calvey worked at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in London, where he made investments in and arranged project financing for several of the first joint-venture projects in the oil sector of the former Soviet Union, including projects owned by Conoco, British Gas, Gulf Canada, and others.
In 1994, Calvey was part of a team backed by Baring Asset Management (BAM) to raise a private equity fund, The First NIS Regional Fund, focused on Russia and other countries in the former Soviet Union. The fund's anchor investors were the EBRD, the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC), TIAA-CREF, and Fidelity. In 1997, together with several colleagues, Calvey founded Baring Vostok Capital Partners to assume the management responsibility from BAM for the First NIS Regional Fund. Baring Vostok also subsequently became part of Baring Private Equity International, a group of funds with investment operations primarily in Asia and Latin America.