(Bloomberg) — Helmut Jeggle spent more than a decade managing the fortune of Thomas and Andreas Struengmann, helping to oversee their holdings in health care, logistics and manufacturing.
Now Jeggle is building his own family office — Salvia — after buying stakes in firms alongside the Struengmann twins, who control a $30.7 billion fortune, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Salvia invested in at least six companies during 2021, the year Jeggle stepped down as a managing director of Athos, the brothers’ family office. They include hearing-technology company Mimi and deep-tech firm Zadient. Salvia has invested in about 10 companies since 2020, mostly start-ups, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
“I want to bring my own fingerprints to some new stories,” Jeggle, 51, said in a recent interview.
Jeggle owns a stake worth about $350 million in BioNTech SE, the company that along with Pfizer Inc. developed a Covid-19 vaccine and where he’s currently chairman.
Jeggle took about half of his team at Munich-based Athos when he left in April and continues to oversee about a dozen investments for the 71-year-old Struengmann brothers, who declined to comment through a representative. That includes their stake in BioNTech, which makes up more than half of their wealth, according to the Bloomberg index.
BioNTech Bet
Jeggle plans to focus on direct investments for his own family office, but initially intends to use funds to explore areas that he’s less familiar with, such as cryptocurrencies.
“We are a team of six and I think there is more to come, but it also depends on this fading out with the family office,” he said regarding Salvia’s ties to Athos. “There is no reason for me at the moment to hire 10 or 50 people.”
He put 250,000 euros ($281,000) in BioNTech along with the Struengmanns and other investors as part of the company’s 2008 seed funding. In 2014, he took out loans to boost his holding by 3.2 million euros. The Mainz, Germany-based firm’s American depositary receipts have surged more than 900% since 2019, even as fears over the latest Covid-19 variant start to fade.
Jeggle sold a chunk of his BioNTech stake worth as much as $49.2 million in 2020 to repay loans and fund Salvia’s activities. He previously joined the Struengmanns in backing Ganymed Pharmaceuticals AG, another firm set up by BioNTech founders Ugur Sahin and Ozlem Tureci that was sold in 2016 for as much as $1.4 billion.
“BioNTech is a story I developed from Day 1,” Jeggle said, adding his original investment in the company was more than his annual salary at the time. “I want to go with that story.”
Jeggle, who has an MBA from the Stuttgart Institute of Management & Technology, started working for the Struengmanns about two decades ago when they owned drugmaker Hexal. The brothers agreed to sell the company to Novartis AG in 2005 along with their stake in affiliate EON Labs for 5.7 billion euros. Jeggle helped to combine the two companies, then began his career at Athos around late 2007.
“It was really interesting for me to go from being a typical back-office finance guy to getting involved in a family office of this size,” Jeggle said. “After a couple of years, the family said, ‘OK, pharma is where we have our roots, so we want to stick in that area.’”
Jeggle set up Salvia in 2014 as he was in the process of boosting his stake in BioNTech, and and then helped to diversify the Struengmann family’s fortune beyond health care.
The Struengmanns joined Salvia in investing in quantum-computing firm IQM and Boxine, a children’s entertainment company that merged last year with German blank-check firm 468 SPAC. They’re also backers of relocation platform Movinga, as well as Efficient Energy, a maker of chilling systems that aims to save energy using water as the refrigerant.
“We behave as we did before,” Jeggle said on his relationship with the Struengmann brothers. “I came to them on the last day of my contact and said, ‘By the way, this is my last day.’ They said, ‘No, we are not saying goodbye. It’s a new address — nothing else.’”
(Adds additional investment in 15th paragraph.)
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