Nicole Junkermann on the Return of Hard Tech and Hardware

The physical world comes back into focus

For a long stretch, the most celebrated technology was made of software. It could be built quickly, copied at almost no cost, and improved overnight. That ease drew enormous energy toward the screen and away from the workshop. Lately, Nicole Junkermann has noticed the attention swinging back toward the physical: toward chips, devices, robotics, energy systems and the real machines that quietly underpin modern life. The hard, tangible layer of technology is drawing fresh interest, and she finds the shift genuinely encouraging.

Part of the reason is simply that software, for all its power, eventually meets the physical world. An intelligent system still needs chips to run on. A clever logistics platform still depends on vehicles, warehouses and the machines that move goods. Cleaner energy still requires hardware that can be built and maintained. As the limits of a purely digital view become clearer, the importance of the physical foundations underneath it comes back into focus, and so does the appetite to build them.

This return suits the way Nicole Junkermann has always looked at technology. Her interests across artificial intelligence, healthtech, biotech, fintech and deep technology have never been confined to software. Much of the work she finds most compelling lives at the meeting point of science, engineering and the real world, and that is precisely where hard tech lives. The renewed energy around hardware is, in a sense, a return to first principles.

Why hardware is hard

There is a reason hardware earned a reputation for being difficult, and Nicole Junkermann respects that difficulty rather than being deterred by it. The physical world is unforgiving. A device has to survive heat, cold, wear, vibration and the simple passage of time. It cannot be patched overnight the way a piece of software can. Mistakes are expensive, because they are made of materials and manufacturing rather than lines of code, and they often surface only once something is already built.

This means hardware moves to a different rhythm. Designing, testing and manufacturing a physical product takes longer and demands a kind of discipline that pure software sometimes allows people to skip. Every detail has to be right before scale is possible, because a flaw multiplied across thousands of units is a serious problem rather than a quick fix. That demand for rigour is, in her view, part of what makes the field so substantial. It cannot be faked.

It also explains why hard tech tends to attract a particular kind of founder. Building real things requires patience, deep expertise and a willingness to do the unglamorous work of getting the engineering right. These are the qualities she looks for across her wider approach, and they are at their most essential in hardware. The difficulty is not a drawback. It is a filter that tends to leave behind serious, capable teams.

Chips, energy and the new foundations

Some of the most important hard tech sits at the very foundations of everything else. Chips are the clearest example. The intelligent systems drawing so much attention all depend on physical processors, and the work of designing and producing better, more efficient chips is among the most demanding engineering in the world. It is deep technology in its purest form, and Nicole Junkermann sees it as one of the most consequential areas of the entire field, precisely because so much else is built on top of it.

Energy hardware is another foundation drawing renewed energy. The machines that generate, store and move power are deeply physical, and progress here ripples outward into almost every other industry. This is where her interest in hard tech overlaps with her thinking on climate, which she sets out in her note on climate technology worth backing. Better hardware for energy is not a niche concern. It is part of the groundwork for a great deal of future progress.

What these foundational areas share is that they are hard to build and hard to replace. Once a team has genuinely advanced the engineering of something fundamental, that advantage is difficult for others to copy quickly. This is exactly the kind of durability Nicole Junkermann looks for, the sort she describes in her note on what she looks for in a deep tech company. Real engineering depth is one of the most lasting advantages a company can have.

Machines that meet the real world

Beyond the foundations, there is a rising wave of machines designed to act in the physical world: robotics, automation and devices that combine intelligent software with capable hardware. Nicole Junkermann finds this meeting point especially interesting, because it is where the digital and the physical genuinely come together. A machine that can sense its surroundings, make a decision and act on it has to be excellent at both the software and the hardware, and getting both right at once is a serious achievement.

The promise here is practical. Machines that can take on dangerous, repetitive or physically demanding tasks can make work safer and free people for the parts that need human judgement. In settings from manufacturing to healthcare to agriculture, well-built machines can quietly improve real days, which connects to her thinking on technology that improves everyday life. The aim is not to remove people, but to take the difficulty and danger out of work that machines can handle better.

What makes this wave credible now is that the surrounding pieces have matured. Better sensors, better software and better components mean that machines which once stayed in the laboratory can begin to work reliably in the messy real world. That gap between a promising prototype and a dependable product is exactly where Nicole Junkermann pays attention, because closing it is the hard part, and the teams that can do it are building something genuinely valuable.

Built for patient capital

If any field is suited to a patient backer, it is hard tech. Hardware and deep engineering take years to mature, and there is no way to rush physics or manufacturing without paying for it later. This is one of the reasons Nicole Junkermann is drawn to the area, and it is consistent with a principle she has written about directly in her note on why patient capital matters in tech. The long horizon is exactly what serious hardware needs.

Patience here is not passivity. It is a recognition that the value compounds quietly, through prototypes that become products, products that become reliable, and reliability that earns trust over years. Backing this kind of work means being willing to wait through the unglamorous middle, when a clever idea is being turned into something that can be manufactured, shipped and depended upon. The companies that get through that middle stretch tend to be the ones that matter for a long time.

The renewed appetite for hard tech is, in part, a renewed appetite for that kind of patience. After a period in which speed and ease were prized above all, there is a growing recognition that some of the most important things simply take time to build well. For a backer who has always valued durability over momentum, that is a welcome change, and it opens the door to supporting work with the potential to last.

A field for serious builders

In the end, the return of hard tech is a return of a certain spirit: the satisfaction of building real things that work in the real world. Nicole Junkermann finds that spirit deeply appealing. There is an honesty to hardware. A physical product either works or it does not, and no amount of presentation can hide a machine that fails. That clarity tends to attract people who care more about substance than show, and they are exactly the kind of builders she likes to support.

This renewed energy fits naturally into the wider picture she follows, alongside the currents she describes in her note on the technology trends she is watching and the connected view she sets out in her map of innovation from fintech to biotech. Hard tech is not separate from those threads. It is the physical layer that makes much of the rest possible, and its return strengthens the whole.

For anyone wondering where serious building is heading next, the message is clear. The screen will always matter, but so will the workshop, the laboratory and the factory floor. The willingness to build real, difficult, lasting things is coming back into fashion, and that is something Nicole Junkermann welcomes. To see how it fits into her broader outlook, you can return to the work of Nicole Junkermann across the journal. The hard road, taken patiently, often leads to the most durable progress.

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