Nicole Junkermann on the Technologies Shaping the Next Decade

The shape of the decade

Every few years a wave of new tools arrives with the promise that everything is about to change. Some of that promise is real and some of it is froth. The work, as Nicole Junkermann sees it, is to tell the two apart with a steady hand. A decade is long enough for genuinely important technology to grow roots, and short enough that we can already see the outlines of what those roots will be.

This note sets out the fields that look most likely to matter between now and the middle of the next decade. The aim is not to predict a single breakthrough or to name a winner. It is to describe the directions of travel that keep showing up across the companies Nicole Junkermann reads, backs and learns from through NJF Capital. The thread running through all of them is simple. The technologies that last are the ones that make a hard, useful thing easier for ordinary people, and they tend to do it quietly.

It helps to hold two ideas at once. The first is that progress is real and worth being excited about. The second is that excitement is not a strategy. Reading the decade well means staying curious without losing your footing, and keeping a clear set of questions close at hand.

Artificial intelligence as a layer

Artificial intelligence is the field most people name first, and for good reason. The change here is not only that models can write, summarise and reason in ways that felt out of reach a few years ago. It is that these abilities are becoming a layer that sits under almost everything else. In the same way that connectivity stopped being a separate product and simply became part of how software works, machine learning is moving from a feature to a foundation.

Nicole Junkermann tends to look at artificial intelligence less as a single market and more as a new set of materials. The interesting question is rarely whether a company uses a model. Almost all of them will. The interesting question is whether the model lets a team solve a problem that was genuinely out of reach before, and whether the result is something people can trust. A tool that drafts a document quickly is helpful. A tool that helps a doctor read a scan with more confidence, or helps a small business understand its own numbers, is a different order of useful.

The next decade of artificial intelligence will be defined less by raw capability and more by judgement: where to apply it, how to keep a human in the loop, and how to build systems that explain themselves. The companies that get this right will feel less like magic and more like good infrastructure. They will be reliable, clear and easy to live with.

Healthtech and biotech

If artificial intelligence is the layer, health and life sciences are the place where it can do some of its most meaningful work. Nicole Junkermann has long been drawn to this corner of technology, and her support for Owkin, which applies artificial intelligence to medical research, reflects that interest. Health is hard, slow and deeply human, which is exactly why careful technology can make such a difference here.

The coming decade is likely to bring steady, compounding gains rather than a single cure-all. Better tools for reading medical images. Faster, more thoughtful drug discovery. Software that helps clinicians spend more time with patients and less time with paperwork. Devices and data that let people understand their own health between appointments. None of these is a headline on its own, yet together they add up to a quieter revolution in how care is delivered.

Biotech sits alongside this. The ability to read and work with biology with increasing precision is opening doors in medicine, agriculture and materials. The pattern Nicole Junkermann watches for is the same one that runs through this whole note. Does the science translate into something a real person, a patient or a clinician, can actually use, and does it earn trust along the way.

Fintech and the plumbing of money

Money is one of the oldest technologies we have, and it is still being rebuilt. Fintech has already changed how millions of people pay, save and borrow, and the next decade will push that further into the background. The most important work in financial technology is often invisible: the plumbing that moves value safely, cheaply and quickly between people and businesses across borders.

Nicole Junkermann's interest in fintech, reflected in her association with companies such as Revolut and Lendable, comes back to access and clarity. Good financial technology widens who can take part in the modern economy and makes the rules of that economy easier to understand. A young person opening their first account, a small firm managing cash flow, a family sending money home: these are the cases that matter, and they are the ones that reward patient, careful design.

Over the next decade, expect fintech to weave more deeply into artificial intelligence, helping people make sense of their own finances rather than simply moving numbers around. The winners will be the ones that treat trust as the product, not an afterthought.

Deep technology and frontier science

Deep technology is the term for companies built on real scientific or engineering advances rather than on a clever interface alone. It covers space, advanced computing, new energy, novel materials and the harder edges of artificial intelligence and biology. These companies tend to take longer to build and ask more of their backers, which is exactly why Nicole Junkermann finds them so compelling.

Her association with SpaceX captures the spirit of this category. Frontier work is slow, demanding and occasionally astonishing. It rewards people who can hold a long horizon and keep going through the unglamorous middle years when the science is being turned into something that works. The next decade will see more of this patient, ambitious building, in fields from clean energy to computing, and the firms that fund it well will be the ones that understand the difference between impatience and ambition.

For a fuller picture of what deep technology means and why it matters, the journal has a companion piece on deep tech explained, and a closer look at what a strong deep tech company looks like.

Where the overlaps happen

The single most useful idea in this note is that the biggest changes rarely come from one field in isolation. They come from the seams where two or more meet. Artificial intelligence applied to biology. Fintech built on better data and machine learning. Deep technology that depends on advances in computing and materials at the same time. Nicole Junkermann spends a great deal of her reading time at these intersections, because that is where the surprising, durable companies tend to appear.

This is why she resists treating her interests as separate buckets. Artificial intelligence, healthtech, biotech, fintech and deep technology are not five unrelated bets. They are one connected map of how technology is moving, and the most interesting points on that map are usually the borders.

• Health and artificial intelligence: better reading of complex medical data.
• Finance and machine learning: tools that help people understand money, not just move it.
• Science and software: deep technology that turns research into usable products.
• Hardware and intelligence: systems where the physical and the digital improve together.

How to read a trend

It is one thing to list fields and another to read them well as they unfold. The habit Nicole Junkermann recommends is to slow down at exactly the moment everyone else is speeding up. When a technology is loudest, it is hardest to think clearly about it, and the loudest moment is rarely the most important one. The quieter years that follow, when a tool settles into daily use, usually tell you far more.

A few questions tend to cut through the noise. Does this make a genuinely hard task easier, or does it just make an easy task faster. Who benefits, and would they choose it without the hype. What happens in five years if this works as intended, and what happens if it only half works. These are the same questions that run through the tech notes and the notebook, and they apply just as well to a single product as to a whole field.

The technologies shaping the next decade are not a mystery. They are visible now, growing quietly at the edges of everyday life. The skill is not in spotting them but in reading them with patience, and in backing the few that will still matter long after the first wave of attention has moved on. That, more than any single prediction, is the through line of how Nicole Junkermann thinks about the years ahead. To follow the rest of this thinking, you can always return to the work of Nicole Junkermann on the home page.

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