NJF Capital, impact and outreach: the NJF portfolio in numbers

There are more ways to measure the impact of investing than pure financial returns

Venture capital companies tend to like measuring things. EBITDA, valuations and rounds, burn and runway, ARR and ARPU, CAGR and TAM when it comes to their portfolio companies (and potential investments); AUM, carry, management fees, IRR and allocations when it comes to themselves.

In other words – though we seem to enjoy acronyms as much as, if not more than, actual words – we value stats and demonstrable data which, no matter what the jargon used to describe them, inform us as to how well our investments are doing. But sometimes, a broader look at the human impact and scale of investment can be as telling.

With that in mind, NJF Capital took a deep dive into the diverse companies that make up our portfolio, crunching the numbers behind everything from behemoth household names that employ thousands of people (think SpaceX or Rippling) to the much nimbler and incisive start-ups we have backed that might be home to just a dozen or so maverick engineers, if that. We used LinkedIn and Crunchbase data, as well as internal information streams. What we found was interesting.

In total, NJF Capital portfolio companies employ 17,653 people, or an average of just under 384 per company. Those whose job categories fall into “research” or “engineering” total 7,038, or approximately 40 per cent of those employees. Turns out our founders and their teams are keen builders and explorers of new ideas. And they’re international, too. Although most are quite predictably based in the UK or the USA, our companies have headquarters based in nine different countries, from Germany to Israel to Sweden to Ireland to Croatia (a warm hello to Gideon Brothers, based in Osijek, Slavonia).

And beyond their direct impact in creating jobs, who else benefits? For one, the 61,000+ B2B clients that NJF Capital’s portfolio companies count between them, and the more than 40 million end-point users they boast. The reach of the portfolio is wide and significant, and the total value of all the companies combined is estimated at more than $180bn. It is sector-agnostic and spread between industries as diverse as fintech, biotech, enterprise, alternative foods, cyber defence and even space transportation among others – a cross-section of the sectors that most strongly comprise the cutting-edge technology that will define the future. Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who are working to make them a reality.