Julia Hawkins

Julia focuses on health and deep tech.

Her investments include: Oxford Nanopore, Vaccitech, YuLife, AccuRx, CoMind, Vira, and Gilion.

Her mission is to back ambitious, thoughtful and diverse founders to transform healthcare from scarcity of clinicians and appointments to ease of access through technology and to enable new and better treatments to reach patients.

My daughter was diagnosed with a rare condition which meant that I had to navigate several health systems and I found it really difficult to get to a diagnosis. But I also saw that there was a lot of promise in terms of both how healthcare could be delivered, if better digital tools were used, and how technology could help to get to better therapies.

Julia’s centre of gravity is London with the Francis Crick Institute on Phoenix Court’s doorstep and DeepMind, UCLH and Royal Free Hospital nearby. She’s Swedish and is excited about fantastic Nordic founders with global ambitions, and is seeing phenomenal healthcare talent in Israel and Boston.

I really like founders that can help me understand their unique perspective – whether it be life experiences, or previous companies that they've built or been associated with – that have led them to the insights that they have. I also look for founders where I can understand and see their ability to attract talent and build teams. There’s something about founders who are able to draw people in, with their energy, with their insights, with their vision that's absolutely fundamental to building a company at the very early stages.

Julia’s career began as an associate in Fixed Income at Goldman Sachs in London. Passionate about startups, she joined Last.fm in 2007 as Business Operations Manager – the ground-breaking music startup’s first generalist hire. In what became one of Europe’s early landmark deals, Last.fm was acquired by CBS.

Julia then joined BBC Worldwide, the corporation’s commercial arm, as Digital Strategy Manager, and worked with all product teams from news to games, before joining Universal Music UK, where she helped launch its corporate venture arm.