Mujeres y Cia - Interview with Nicole Junkermann
This article is an English translation of the original Spanish version published in mujeres y Cia
Copyright - mujeres y Cia
Nicole Junkermann was born in Germany but spent her entire childhood in Malaga, a place to which she has never stopped returning. Now based in London, Nicole is an international entrepreneur and investor, and the founder of NJF Holdings, an international investment company with interests in venture capital, private equity, and real estate. Through NJF’s venture capital arm, the company oversees a portfolio of over 30 start-ups across three continents, including in healthcare, fintech, and deep tech.
1. As an investor in international projects which are looking to bring innovation, analytics or artificial intelligence into the healthcare sector, what can we learn from the COVID-19 crisis?
In these unprecedent times, we are seeing governments across the world clearly stating that, in response to the Coivd-19 crisis they make decisions and take strategies ‘led by science’, on the advice from their scientific advisors based on the available facts and data at the time.
This data-driven approach is certainly nothing new. Data, and big data in particular, affect all aspects of our lives; data analytics has proved very useful to help solve problems across a range of industries. For example, we are familiar to hearing that the big tech companies like Google or Facebook use data to offer us more personalised and relevant advertising. Data in the healthcare world is no exception and it is clear that having a data-led approach to healthcare is not only vital to fighting the current COVID-19 threat, but to safeguard against any future global pandemics.
Unfortunately, and with no vaccination to COVID-19 on the short-term horizon, what we are seeing at present is a tension between a huge reliance on data and predictive models to shape strategy, and a lack of clear and consistent data being shared across international organisations and scientific researchers.
What we can learn therefore is that it is not sufficient to simply have vast amounts of data, what is required is quality data that is shared collaboratively across the international community. In addition, we are learning just how important it is to adequately invest in innovation, particularly innovation driven by analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)-based research, in the healthcare sector.
From my perspective as an investor, I have seen first-hand through some of portfolio companies just how important it is to support and invest in companies working to use analytics and AI to transform parts of the healthcare system. In fact, this is the very reason why I began to invest in healthcare technology back in 2014.
As an example, one of the companies I have invested in is Toronto-based Deep Genomics who have developed an AI-driven platform which can enable a systematic, efficient, and reliable approach to drug development. Deep Genomics’s research shows that, on average, it takes at least 10 years for new medicine to complete the journey from initial discovery to the marketplace at a cost of $2.6 billion. The platform they have built is designed to reduce this traditional timeline to years not decades and the costs from millions not billions and resulted in the company being the first AI-focused company to discover a drug candidate in less than 18 months – for the potentially life-threatening genetic condition Wilson’s disease.
I also sit on the board of Paris-based OWKIN which harnesses the power of AI for medical research to use machine learning, integrated with system biology, to develop faster, safer, and more effective medicines and treatments for patients. OWKIN’s AI-driven approach is already showing impressive results, for example in 2019, the company trained its machine learning platform to successfully make a major discovery in developing a model to predict and explain the key prognostic factors for Mesothelioma, a type of cancer usually linked to asbestos exposure.
These lessons – of effectively sharing data while investing in analytical and AI-driven healthcare innovation – are ones that the international community will need to adapt to quickly.
2. More generally, what do you think the world post-COVID-19 will look like?
Like everything surrounding this crisis, it is very difficult to predict at this time what the world will be like after this pandemic; how the world will look will depend significantly on geopolitics and international cooperation. For me, now more than ever is the time for international governments, organizations, and communities to work together and act quickly and decisively.
It is therefore disappointing to see the numerous examples of the lack of international cooperation. In the European Union (EU), only last week did we see Mauri Ferrari, who had only been the president of the European Research Council on 1 January this year, resign saying he was “extremely disappointed by the European response” to the pandemic after complaining about running into institutional and political obstacles as he sought to swiftly set up a scientific program to combat the virus. While, on 14 April, Donald Trump dramatically announced he was halting US$500m of funding from the US to the World Health Organisation (WHO), accompanied by the accusation from Trump that the WHO is “accelerating the pandemic”.
In addition to the lack of collaboration, we are also seeing increasing signs of protectionism from across the world. There is sadly plenty of evidence across the globe in the scramble to obtain sufficient medical equipment. The EU Commission recently imposed an EU-wide export ban for certain medical equipment in a bid to keep sufficient supplies within the bloc, a moved swiftly followed by the UK. We have also seen how the US’s bid obtain medical supplies worldwide caused a very public trading and diplomatic dispute with Canada and Germany.
More generally, we have already seen trade war tensions between the US and China before the pandemic broke. This will be not be eased by Trump's desire to promote national products to safeguard the American national economy and in my view, these tensions will accelerate after the pandemic. For example, in the face of potential record unemployment the Trump administration will surely seek to have even more parts of the country’s manufacturing and production chains return to the US to create new jobs and reset the economy as soon as possible.
So, while globalization has been the trend for the past 50 years, this pandemic could well be a turning point and change that trend. I think that the US and China will continue to be the main economic powers, and that we will see a fight for international influence and trade tensions between the two countries. A point to note though is that, as the infection and death rate continues to climb across the world, if China can quickly overcome this pandemic and start to return to ‘normal’, as their official data suggests they are close to, then the country could be in a strong position to benefit in economic and commercial terms.
If we leave international politics aside and focus on the impact on people, very few will benefit from this pandemic and it will surely be a difficult transition out of this virus for millions of people around the world. With a huge portion of the global population having been subject to, or still in, “lockdown restrictions”, as societies emerge from these measures, the everyday lives of individuals will be markedly different.
Aside from the economic impact, I am sure that people’s consumption behaviour will change dramatically and the business world will need to react quickly. I think we will see significant changes in how people travel, especially internationally, how people consume entertainment services, or whether working from home becomes more of a norm. One thing is for sure, all of these changes have been powered by technological advances and it is hard to imagine what a crisis like this would have been like 30 years ago without the modern technology we enjoy today.
3. Do you feel that being a woman gives you a different perspective as an investor, and how has your experience been as a woman in the investment world?
I do feel that being a female investor does, as with all diverse backgrounds, bring a different perspective as an investor. That said, the last thing I look at when evaluating an investment is whether the entrepreneur in front of me is a man or a woman, or where they come from, or their religion. When I invest, I am investing in people and what I look at is their abilities as an entrepreneur and their ideas.
It is obviously very important to fight for diversity and ensure the entry of less represented groups into the investment world, but it is essential that all decisions are made entirely on individual merit
More generally, I have always felt very lucky to be a female investor in the modern world, especially if we compare the position today with what our mothers or grandmothers faced. However, if we look at the latest statistics in the UK (where I am based) and Spain, we see that although much progress has been made, much remains to be done. A recent study by JP Morgan showed that in the UK, only 9% of investment in start-ups was for female-founders start-ups, and if we look only at Venture Capital this figure drops to 1%. And in Spain, it is a similar story; according to the latest Entrepreneurship Map published by South Summit at the end of 2019, only 19% of start-ups are founded by women.
I hope that my daughter and future generations of entrepreneurial women do not encounter any kind of barrier and that is why we must continue working in this area.
On the positive, I do think we are seeing real progress here. As an example, the rise of “Femtech” – technology geared to improving women’s lives and which is a market expected to be worth $50bn by 2025 – is crucially one where female-founded businesses are flourishing and at the front of this disruption.
In my portfolio, we are very proud to have three female-founded businesses which is significantly higher the average mentioned above. One of these is Elvie, co-founded by Tania Boler in 2014, which has made great progress in developing products including the world’s first silent, wearable breast pump and the kegel pelvic trainer, which are making a real difference to the lives of women across the world. The second is Swarm, a satellite company committed to providing accessible, low-cost global connectivity, founded in 2016 by Dr. Sara Spangelo. And the third is a company in stealth mode, which seeks to fight climate change by studying and optimizing the energy needs of large industries. This US-based company was created when the CEO first identified the opportunity to use artificial intelligence to optimize Google's Data Centers, reducing its energy consumption by 40%.
4. You have invested in many countries but not yet in Spain, are you interested in investing in our country?
Spain is a special country for me. I grew up here and it is a country with which I have many emotional ties. The greatest attraction of this country is the talent of the people.
We have already looked at various possibilities in various sectors ranging from entertainment to biotechnology to the cutting-edge technological innovations, but nothing has yet been finalised. I hope that soon we can make an investment, because in Spain there is an unquestionable talent and a wealth of ideas and of course we would like contribute where we can.