By Contributor,Geri Stengel

Copyright forbes

From right to left: Eileen Tanghal, MBA and Tara Bishop, MD, MPH, founders and managing directors at Black Opal Ventures.
Black Opal Ventures is a women-led venture capital firm, investing at the intersection of frontier technology and healthcare to back industry-transforming companies.

Venture capital is still a man’s game. Solely female-founded companies received just 2.1% of U.S.venture capital in 2024, while mixed-gender founding teams accounted for 21.6%. At the other end of the table, only 17.3% of decision-makers at venture firms with more than $50 million in assets under management are women.

Against those odds, Black Opal Ventures has carved out space as a women-led firm investing at the intersection of frontier technology and healthcare innovation.

Frontier Technology And Healthcare Innovation Collide

Black Opal Ventures was founded by MIT sorority sisters Dr. Tara Bishop and Eileen Tanghal, who took parallel but complementary career paths—one in medicine, the other in technology and venture capital. Backed by institutions such as Eli Lilly, Bank of America, and JPMorgan, the firm was built on what Bishop and Tanghal call “the collision of two industries.”

Their thesis is straightforward: The biggest breakthroughs happen when cutting-edge technologies—like AI, robotics, and bioengineering—are applied to stubborn healthcare problems.

“We have a thesis that industry-transforming companies bring together two worlds,” said Bishop. “If you can bring frontier technologies into healthcare and life sciences, that’s where we’ll see transformation.”

The timing matters. Women-founded startups still struggle to attract capital. In 2024, female founders raised $47.3 billion—a 13.7% increase from the prior year—but their share of total venture funding slid from the prior year, according to PitchBook.

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Breaking Barriers For Women In Venture Capital

For Tanghal, the road to venture capital began as an electrical engineering and computer science student at MIT, followed by a stint at a fast-scaling Valley startup in the late 1990s and one that didn’t succeed. She later became a corporate VC at Applied Materials and Arm, then a senior partner at In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture arm.

“Whenever you see venture capital and tech, there are very few women,” said Tanghal. “It’s been my passion to bring more women into the venture capital ecosystem.”

Bishop took a different path. A physician by training, she spent 25 years in New York’s healthcare system as a clinician, policy researcher, and consultant before helping build a health insurance startup acquired by UnitedHealth. Her background gave Black Opal a rare advantage: domain expertise in healthcare to complement Tanghal’s deep tech credentials.

Together, they offered something most women-led funds could not: seasoned venture capital experience paired with frontier healthcare knowledge. That combination proved persuasive for institutional investors.

Global Shocks Reshape VC, BOV Pivots Fundraising Tactics

The dual shocks of the Ukraine war and the Silicon Valley Bank collapse reshaped the venture capital landscape, directly influencing fundraising for firms like Black Opal Ventures. The war fueled investor risk aversion, pushing capital toward “safe bets” such as defense, cybersecurity, and infrastructure. The SVB collapse—removing a crucial lifeline for startups and VCs—exposed systemic vulnerabilities, disrupted liquidity, and drove investors to adopt more conservative practices.

Against this backdrop, Black Opal cofounders Bishop and Tanghal had already secured $55 million, largely from institutional investors, toward their $75 million target. But, as institutions grew skittish, the duo pivoted, tapping a pool of high-net-worth women. When the fund opened to individual investors outside their immediate network in late 2023, Bishop and Tanghal were overwhelmed with the positive response, especially among high-net-worth female individual investors.

By emphasizing healthcare’s resilience and urgency, they positioned their strategy as both mission-driven and a hedge against macroeconomic uncertainty—ultimately raising an additional $8 million through Ellevest and the Women of the World Endowment platforms.

Investing In Healthcare Innovation At The Intersection of Frontier Technology

Black Opal focuses on four areas of healthcare—diagnosis, delivery, drug discovery, and defense of data—its so-called 4D strategy. The firm aligns its investments with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, targeting inequities in access, affordability, and quality of care. “Solving unsolved problems in healthcare requires new tools,” Tanghal explained. “When you combine deep tech with clinical expertise, you create system change.” That philosophy has shaped the firm’s portfolio.

Outpace Bio is developing AI-designed CAR-T therapies to target solid tumors, such as platinum-resistant ovarian cancer. Conceivable is building robotic IVF labs to expand access to fertility care. Empatica, a digital health company spun out of MIT, creates wearables and biomarkers that transform clinical trials and patient monitoring. And then there is FlyteHealth, a precision obesity-care startup co-founded by Dr. Katherine Saunders.

“We are proud to be Black Opal Ventures’ first portfolio company,” Saunders said. “Their investment brought deep industry expertise to support strategic decisions, commercialization, and our presence across the industry.” Institutional investors are also watching closely.

“As an investor in Fund I, we’ve seen Black Opal Ventures combine deep clinical insight with technical expertise to back founders improving patient outcomes and healthcare infrastructure,” said Alex Ellis, portfolio manager at Arjuna Capital. “We believe the partners’ complementary backgrounds across medical research, company building, and institutional investing give them a clear edge in sourcing and supporting category-defining companies.”

Women VCs Advance Healthcare Innovation

Black Opal Ventures is still young—officially launched in 2022—but its founders are already showing how women VCs can compete on equal terms. The stakes are clear: Women-only founded startups still receive less than 2% of U.S. venture funding, and women hold fewer than one in five VC decision-making seats. By anchoring its thesis at the nexus of frontier technology and healthcare innovation, the firm is aiming for more than returns—it’s pushing to reshape an industry that touches everyone. By backing founders at the cutting edge of science, Black Opal Ventures is proving that the future of healthcare and venture capital can be more inclusive, more innovative, and more impactful.

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