Professional Experience
Eileen Tanghal is the co-founder and Managing Director of Black Opal Ventures, an early-stage venture capital fund investing in hard tech healthcare. Eileen has almost twenty years of venture capital experience and has been involved with and sat on the boards of over 40 high-tech startup companies in the US and Europe as a financial venture capitalist, corporate venture capitalist, and on behalf of the US intelligence community. At Black Opal Ventures, she has led investments in Hyro, Tigergraph and Blaze.tech. Her successful exits include Liquavista, Sequans, Chipidea, Pinebrook Imaging, IMS Nano, Twist Bioscience, & Blue Danube. Eileen served as Senior Partner and Managing Director of In-Q-Tel, where she led several investments in AI, compute, and communications and was involved in investments in a number of leading startups in AI including Falkonry, Mythic, Edge Impulse, and Cerebras. Prior to In-Q-Tel, Eileen was Vice President of New Business Ventures at Arm and General Manager of Applied Ventures, the venture capital arm of Applied Materials. She began her venture capital career in the UK as an associate with Amadeus Capital Partners and then a Director for Kennet Partners. Prior to entering venture capital, she was part of the founding engineering team of PDF Solutions, a successful semiconductor startup company (Ticker:PDFS). At Applied Materials she received the Silicon Valley TWIN award for executive women. Eileen has been featured in Forbes, IEEE Spectrum, and Venture Capital Journal. She is an MIT alum (electrical engineering) and London Business School alum (MBA). Eileen sits on the Board of Notre Dame High School for girls in San Jose, CA.