Profile
From Online Auctions To Famous French Brands In Shanghai To Dubai: Building The Bridge Between Digital Capital And Real-World Assets
Harold Levillair learned platforms at iBazar and cash flow in retail. In Dubai, he is putting the two together.
Harold Levillair, a French entrepreneur based in Dubai, has worked in three industries: technology, retail and now finance. The thread is easy to follow. What he learned in each one, he took into the next.
Technology: Connecting Two Sides
He started on the commercial side of France’s first internet companies. After Lycos, he became commercial director of iBazar, the auction site eBay absorbed in 200110, then moved to the mapping company Maporama.
At iBazar, before and after the eBay deal, he saw how a marketplace builds trust between people who have never met, and how fast a platform grows once both sides get what they came for.
Retail: The Real Economy
In the mid-2000s he moved to Shanghai and founded Levillair Group. He took the PAUL franchise for mainland China and became founder and chief executive of PAUL China1. Shanghai Daily counted nine bakeries opened in twenty months2. The company also took in trainees from Shanghai Young Bakers, a charity that teaches French baking to young people3.
In 2009 he opened Pavilion Costes in Xintiandi with Laurence Levillair: 1,800 square metres over four storeys, interiors by Jacques Garcia and, according to the same newspaper, the first Hôtel Costes venue outside France2. He later sold Levillair Group to a Chinese retail group, which rebranded the bakeries.
Back in France, he ran Le Pain Quotidien’s French business as chief executive, and was a franchise owner himself. Le Pain Quotidien, founded in Brussels, was then run from a head office in New York13. In 2014 the trade press presented him as directeur général of Le Pain Quotidien Provence, in charge of developing the French market, as the brand opened on the Croisette in Cannes after Aix-en-Provence and Marseille4.
From Shanghai to the Riviera, with a head office in New York, running stores taught him something a balance sheet does not show: a sound business can run short of cash for a few days or a few weeks, and that gap decides everything.
Finance: Linking The Two
He has lived in Dubai since 2025, where he is building an infrastructure that links digital capital to real-world assets. The reasoning is simple. Large pools of capital now sit in digital form and look for sound uses. Operating businesses need short-term credit. He is building the link between the two, with the platform logic he learned in technology and the feel for cash he gained in retail.
The questions he is asked most often are answered, with references, in the Q&A.