Julia Kuijs

Associate

Julia backs high-energy founders in compute, semiconductors and automation. Those who are moving fast, measuring everything, and building products that last.

Focus chips

Robotics & Automation

Semicon & quantum

Data-driven investing

Background

Julia’s path into venture starts with numbers. She began her career in finance, first at an investment banking scale-up and later at a market maker, gaining hands-on experience in financial markets, risk, and data modelling.

Parallel to that, she trained in Machine Learning, adding a technical layer to her finance backbone. That combination; markets plus models, shapes how she evaluates companies today: grounded in fundamentals, informed by data, and filtered through pattern recognition.

At FORWARD.one, Julia now invests in the Future of Compute, Robotics and Automation. She works with founders building hard, defensible technology and pushes them to move faster, measure better, and build with long-term utility in mind. Internally, she leads the Automation efforts, constantly looking for ways to remove friction, speed up workflows, and turn the firm’s own operations into a performance machine.

I look for teams who move fast, operate with urgency, and turn every iteration into learning and momentum.

Focus & Thesis

What Julia invests in

Future of Compute. Julia focuses on the hardware and infrastructure that will power tomorrow’s compute, from quantum processors to enabling technologies in the chip stack.
Robotics & Automation. She looks for systems that replace manual work with intelligent automation and become critical infrastructure in industrial value chains.
Products with staying power. The companies that excite her most build tools the world will still rely on in 10+ years.
Speed as a competitive edge. With billions of people and ideas, she believes speed of execution will separates the outliers from the rest.
Data-led decision making. With a finance and Machine Learning background, she thinks in numbers, patterns and feedback loops, both in evaluating companies and in improving FORWARD.one’s own engine.

Boards & Notable Investments

Building companies is an endurance game, like long-distance hiking or snowboarding, you commit to the next peak, pace yourself and keep moving, even when the weather turns.