By Dr. Tara Bishop
Three years ago, we launched Black Opal Ventures with the belief that highly innovative technology has the power to transform healthcare. Our mission has always been to back visionary teams solving critical challenges, like unsustainable costs and uncured disease. Our first portfolio company, FlyteHealth, exemplifies this thesis— improving health outcomes and driving impact through groundbreaking innovation in medicine and technology.
When we first invested in FlyteHealth, we saw a company that was addressing a critical unmet need in the market. Obesity is one of the most prevalent diseases - over forty percent of US adults meet the clinical criteria for obesity. The disease can lead to or worsen over 200 health conditions including diabetes and heart disease. Coming from the payer side, I understood that obesity care was a critical issue, yet existing solutions mostly focused on diet and exercise, rather than treating obesity as a medical condition. There was a clear gap in the market, and the potential opportunity was enormous.
Most importantly, we trusted the team at FlyteHealth. I had met two of their clinical founders years before our investment. Dr. Louis Aronne is a pioneer in obesity medicine, serving as the founder and Chair Emeritus of the American Board of Obesity Medicine. He taught lectures in my first-year medical school class at Cornell in the 1990s, a time when obesity was not yet recognized as a disease. Dr. Katherine Saunders is a leading expert in obesity medicine and one of the first fellowship-trained obesity specialists in the country. I met Katherine when she was an intern at NewYork-Presbyterian, and I was an early faculty member. From that experience, I knew the clinical team at FlyteHealth was second to none and would always prioritize the quality of care in their work.
Every early-stage investment comes with uncertainty—be it market adoption, product development, commercialization, or team execution. When we partnered with FlyteHealth, they were still defining their product-market fit, scaling operations, and navigating an evolving industry. What we couldn’t have fully predicted were the tailwinds that would emerge. In the summer of 2021, Novo Nordisk’s GLP-1 receptor agonist, Wegovy, was approved for the treatment of obesity. In November 2023, Eli Lilly’s GLP-1/GIP dual agonist, Zepbound, received approval for obesity treatment. GLP-1s took center stage, fundamentally reshaping the conversation around obesity care.
We are incredibly proud of FlyteHealth’s success and the impact they are making. They have emerged as a leader in delivering patient-centered, evidence-based obesity medicine, combining cutting-edge digital technologies with the latest in metabolic science. Their commercial agreement with the State of Connecticut is a testament to their growing influence. And the company’s outcomes speak for themselves—patients experience an average weight loss of 16.6% after only one year, while seeing improvements in other biomarkers such as HbA1c and blood pressure.
FlyteHealth’s achievements go beyond the metrics, and their partnership has been instrumental in helping us define our role as investors. While we made an early bet on FlyteHealth, they equally placed their trust in Black Opal Ventures, believing we could offer valuable strategic guidance, commercialization support, and a drive to maximize their impact. As both FlyteHealth and Black Opal have evolved, so too has our collaboration. We are deeply grateful for this partnership and excited to continue supporting their mission to reshape obesity care. This is only the beginning.
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