Nicole Junkermann is an international entrepreneur and investor, who has built and sold media businesses, invested in disruptive, cutting edge tech companies and raised her own sports private equity fund. Based in London, but a speaker of six languages with experience of living and working in Europe, Asia and the US, Nicole is the Founder of NJF Holdings, an international finance and investment company with extensive interests across venture capital, private equity and real estate.
Through the company’s venture capital arm (NJF Capital), Nicole oversees an investment portfolio across Europe and the US similar in size to a small venture capital fund. She brings a different perspective to her investments by having experience sitting on both sides of the investment table.
Having founded and built her own businesses, Nicole has learnt first-hand the challenges of starting, growing, and running a profitable company. Now as an investor, Nicole draws on this experience to identify visionary like-minded companies and entrepreneurs who NJF Holdings can support and help guide along their journeys.
Currently based in London, Nicole has lived and worked across Europe, the US, and Asia. As a result of this international experience as an investor, alongside a career which has covered a wide range of sectors shaped by technology and innovation, she brings a successful generalist approach to analysing businesses and investment opportunities which has enabled the NJF team to anticipate market trends and stay ahead of the investment curve.
Since founding NJF Holdings in 2012, and with a mission, in part, to invest in companies tackling some of society’s most pressing-challenges, Nicole was an early investor in both the healthcare and biotech sectors. In investing in these areas, the focus has been on early-stage companies looking to utilise the latest advancements in technology – such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning – to make much-needed breakthroughs in their medical fields.
In the early days of the internet and soon after graduating from university, Nicole embarked as an entrepreneur by building and selling her first business, the gaming platform Winamax. Afterwards, she worked at LDCOM, which would later merge with Neuf Telecom to become Neuf Cegetel, one of the largest telecommunications companies in France. She then joined at inception and developed Infront Sports and Media into one of the world’s leading sports media rights businesses before selling it to Bridgepoint for €600m in 2011. Nicole also invested in Shanghai Really Sports, China’s third largest sports retailer, and went on to raise her own €242.5m private equity fund, United in Sports, focused on sports and media. Today, Nicole is focused on venture investments in deep tech areas, such as AI, transformative healthcare and fintech, as well as seeking out more developed opportunities in PE and real estate.
NJF Capital is the venture capital arm of NJF Holdings. Junkermann is among a new group of entrepreneurs and investors with a common vision that transformative technologies in areas such as genomics, virtual reality and artificial intelligence will create major breakthroughs in healthcare, financial infrastructure, security and premium content. It is within these areas, where the old and the new converge through innovation and the potential to disrupt existing industries, that we look to discover the companies of tomorrow.