Nicole Junkermann, also known as Countess Nicole Brachetti Peretti, (born 27 April 1975) is a German entrepreneur and investor with international activities in the sports, healthcare, and technology sectors. She lives in west London.
Junkermann is the founder of NJF Holdings, an international investment company with interests in venture capital, private equity, and real estate.
Nicole Junkermann, born in Düsseldorf, is the only daughter of businessman Heinz Junkermann and his wife Ingrid. Her father Heinz Junkermann, born in 1928 in Frankfurt am Main, owned several companies. He founded a jewellery store (Schmuck-Kassette GmbH), a real estate company (IFG Gesellschaft für Immobilienbesitz) and a private bank for wealthy clients.
He took his daughter with him to business meetings when she was 12 in order to prepare her for her future career. Junkermann grew up in Marbella, Spain and studied business administration and management at the International University of Monaco (1998) and Harvard Business School (2002) in the United States.
Junkermann started her career as a model and she later co-founded the online gambling business Winamax in 1998.
In 2002 Junkermann as a minority shareholder and the former Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus bought Infront Sports & Media out of the decaying media empire of Leo Kirch. By 2011, the company was owned by a group of private investors, including majority shareholder Jacobs Holding, the Junkermann Group, and Dr. Martin Steinmeyer, with Philippe Blatter, nephew of then-FIFA president Sepp Blatter, serving as chairman and president. The company acquired the rights to the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany and, in 2011, obtained permission to market the television rights for the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups in Asian markets. The company was subsequently sold to private equity group Bridgepoint Capital in a transaction valued at approximately $600 million.
Shortly after the sale of Infront in 2012, Junkermann founded NJF Holdings. Its venture capital arm, NJF Capital ("Nicole Junkermann Finance Capital"), is registered in the British Virgin Islands and headquartered in London. The fund manages a diversified portfolio with investments across healthcare, biotech, sports, fintech, and deep tech.
Three of NJFâÂÂs early investments include Songza, Dollar Shave Club, and RelateIQ, which were acquired by Google, Unilever, and Salesforce respectively. JunkermannâÂÂs approach in NJF Capital has been to bridge traditional and emerging technologies which has created a portfolio of unicorn companies. Through these investments, she has participated in projects alongside prominent figures such as Google co-founder Eric Schmidt and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel. Her current stakes include high-profile companies like Revolut, SpaceX, Rippling, and Lendable.
In the healthcare and technology sectors, Junkermann has backed Owkin in 2020, a Paris-based AI startup that uses machine learning for medical and biological research; she serves on its board of directors. She has also invested in media companies, including the renowned photo agency Magnum Photos in 2019. ÃÂ She is part of the board of the cybersecurity investment fund created by Pablo Casado in 2024.
Another notable investment is the cybersecurity company Carbyne (formerly Reporty), founded in 2014, which provides technology for streaming emergencies directly to services via an app. Junkermann invested in the company together with Jeffrey Epstein and served on its board of directors alongside former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (who was also the former head of Israel's Military Intelligence Directorate) and the former director of Israel's military intelligence Unit 8200, Pinhas Buchris.
Junkermann has been a committee member of the Tate Americas Foundation, an independent charity that supports the work of the Tate Gallery in the United Kingdom, since 2005. Junkermann previously served on the HealthTech Advisory Board of the UK government's Department of Health and Social Care, having been appointed by Matt Hancock, MP in November 2018. The board guides the Secretary of State and government on its mission to transform technology in the National Health Service. In sports, Nicole has also served as an advisor to the Italian Olympic Committee.
Junkermann was appointed a trustee of the Royal Marsden Cancer Charity as well as the Royal Academy Trust. She was a visiting professor at Lancaster University. She stepped down from or was terminated from these positions following evidence in the Epstein files that she had a long-running correspondence with him.
In the late 1990s, Junkermann began a relationship with French businessman and Adidas CEO Robert Louis-Dreyfus, who was three decades older than her, while he was still married to Margarita Bogdanova. She later had a long-term relationship with aristocrat businessman Count Patrick Graf von Faber-Castell, the son of Honorary Chinese citizen Hubertus Graf von Faber-Castell.
In 2017, she married the aristocrat and one of the richest Italians Count Ferdinando Brachetti Peretti (born 1960), with whom she has a daughter. Their daughter was baptized in 2019 in the Papal Choir Chapel of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome; Sophie Habsburg was the godmother. She lived in Monaco until her marriage, and thereafter in London.
In 2020 Junkermann and her husband became the new owners of Los Alburejos, an estate located in Medina-Sidonia, southern Spain.
Junkermann speaks German, English, French, Italian and Spanish languages. As of 2018, she lived in South Kensington, London. She is a fan of the football club Real Madrid.