About 30 years ago, Eileen Tanghal and Dr. Tara Bishop met during their first year of school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The pair studied engineering and worked together on academic and philanthropic ventures in university. After graduating, they remained close confidants in their careers.
Their work initially took them into different industries. Bishop became an academic physician, moved into healthcare consulting at McKinsey & Co. and then joined a health insurance startup. Tanghal is a venture capitalist who was most recently a senior partner at In-Q-Tel.
Now, their MIT roots have brought Bishop and Tanghal back together to launch Black Opal Ventures. The firm publicly launched this week, having raised $58 million so far for its inaugural health-tech fund. Its investors include Eli Lilly and Co., Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Asset Management’s Project Spark.
An MIT brain collective
Every year or so, Bishop, Tanghal and some fellow MIT alumni gather to catch up. Four years ago, Tanghal said the group was chatting about the data technology she was investing in with In-Q-Tel, the venture capital partner for federal defense and intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA.
“It turns out that a lot of the tech that I was investing in, the companies in which I was sitting on the board, could see applicability of their technology to healthcare and life science,” Tanghal said.
But, Tanghal said, most of these companies don’t know how to maneuver the healthcare system. They’re also not used to building tech for patients rather than other technologists.
“If you’re trying to build tech that helps people, you really need diversity within your board, within your management teams and within your product engineering teams, frankly,” Tanghal said.
Tanghal saw a solution to this problem sitting right in front of her. She and Bishop decided to call on their network of MIT-educated women who were leaders in areas like healthcare and life sciences and forming a seed investing group. That evolved into Black Opal Ventures as the firm brought on additional support from large institutions.
The collision of healthcare and technology
Black Opal aims to improve healthcare for everyone, including underrepresented people who may not have benefited from advancements in the past.
“Tara and I have often been the first women, first underrepresented people in the industries that we’ve been in, and we really see ourselves as people who can bridge worlds,” Tanghal said.
She said their fund is always looking for the best companies at the intersection of healthcare and technology. If promising companies don’t already have diverse teams, Tanghal said they help them find that talent at the board, executive or engineering team levels.
“Having trained as engineers, we know that in order to solve the hardest problems, you have to bring loads of different views to the table,” Tanghal said.
Diverse teams have an impact on the future of healthtech products. Even today, researchers are finding that tools like pulse oximeters, which measure oxygen rates in the blood, have higher error rates in Black patients because the imaging technology was not designed to read darker skin tones.
Bishop said they’re focusing on four areas of the industry: Diagnosis and prevention, delivery of care, drugs and therapeutics, and data and artificial intelligence.
The firm is looking for startups that need seed funding up to Series B. They don’t have a regional focus, but Bishop is based in New York City, while Tanghal is in California. The fund still has $15 million left to be subscribed.
Black Opal Ventures has made strategic investments in nine companies, including Boston-based Empatica. Its other portfolio companies also include Intellihealth, Conceivable Life Sciences, Optellum, Hyro, TigerGraph and Blaze.tech.
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