Nicole Junkermann has spent her career positioned at both ends of a pipeline most investors have been slow to treat as a sector. The founder of NJF Holdings — who built her early career in professional sport, co-founded Infront Sports & Media sold to Bridgepoint for over €600m in 2011, and today runs Gameday by NJF Holdings alongside a venture portfolio of more than 40 companies — argues that elite sport is the most reliable product development lab in consumer health. And that the investors who understand the sequence stand to benefit from both ends of it.
The most reliable product development lab in consumer health doesn’t belong to any company. It’s the professional locker room. Heart-rate variability tracking began as an elite training tool; it now ships on every smartwatch. Cryotherapy, compression recovery, continuous glucose monitors for people without diabetes, sleep tracking, protein timing — each followed the same route, from the training grounds of professional sport to the shopping baskets of people who’ll never compete at anything. The sequence is so consistent it amounts to a commercial law: what elite athletes adopt at any price eventually becomes a mass market at scale.
“Professional athletes are, in effect, test cases for human performance optimisation,” Junkermann said when NJF publicly identified the convergence of sport and life sciences as an emerging investment frontier in June. “The recovery protocols, the biomechanical analysis, the injury prevention systems developed for elite sport consistently filter into mainstream medicine over time.”
The investment question is what happens as that filtering accelerates.
The shift Nicole Junkermann says turned performance science into an industry of its own
For most of sporting history, performance science was an expense – something clubs spent money on to protect more valuable assets, namely players. That’s changed within roughly a decade. The performance layer of sport has become an industry with its own companies, its own revenue models and its own exit history: wearables firms, recovery technology brands, biometric analytics platforms, nutrition companies built on protocols rather than marketing.
Two forces drove the shift. The first is money at the top. A Premier League squad or an NBA roster represents hundreds of millions in payroll, which makes a marginal gain in availability – one fewer hamstring injury, one faster return to play – worth serious spending. Elite sport became a customer that pays almost anything for products that demonstrably work, which is precisely the customer a young company needs.
The second force is the smartphone-sized change in who else wants the products. “The consumer who buys a €300 wearable to track their sleep is buying a simplified version of what a Champions League medical department was using five years earlier,” Junkermann says. “That’s the pattern to underwrite. Elite sport does the R&D spending and proves the product works on the most demanding users alive. The consumer market provides the scale. Very few sectors hand investors both halves of that equation so cleanly.”
Reading the pipeline
The discipline, she argues, lies in knowing where in the pipeline to invest – and where not to. The glamour end, consumer wellness, is crowded and brutally marketing-driven; the durable value tends to sit further upstream, in the measurement and data layers that both markets depend on.
“I’m most interested in the instrumentation,” she says. “Whoever owns the measurement owns the category. Sensors, biometric data platforms, the analytical tools that turn a training session into something clinically legible – those are the picks and shovels. Consumer brands will come and go on top of them.”
There’s a familial resemblance here to how NJF Capital has invested elsewhere – backing Groq in AI compute and Owkin in machine-learning drug discovery, infrastructure plays both – and Junkermann is explicit that the same logic applies. The firm has said it will detail specific investment activity in the sports performance space later this year.
The pipeline is also lengthening at both ends. Upstream, professional sport is becoming more instrumented every season, generating datasets on human performance that medicine has never had access to. Downstream, the customer is changing: an ageing population that increasingly treats physical capacity in later life as something to invest in rather than accept. The person doing zone-two cardio on doctor’s advice and the athlete managing training load are, commercially speaking, converging on the same products.
Why the deeper trend no longer depends on any single product surviving scrutiny
None of this is without hazard, and the sector’s enthusiasts tend to skate past the obvious one: much of performance science rests on thinner evidence than its pricing implies. Recovery modalities in particular have a habit of outrunning their trial data, and a market built on elite endorsement can deflate quickly when the science fails to arrive. Nicole Junkermann’s response is that this is an argument for her positioning rather than against the sector – measurement and data infrastructure hold their value precisely because they’re what separates the products that work from the ones that merely sell.
The deeper trend, though, doesn’t depend on any single product surviving scrutiny. Elite sport has become the proving ground for how far human performance can be engineered, and the rest of the population has started paying attention to the results. Investors, as usual, are somewhere behind the athletes – buying what the locker room bought a few years ago, and calling it the future.
