Azure Skye, Venture Fellow

What first pulled you toward the venture side of health and life sciences?

It was a natural progression of my interests, education, and professional experience. My training as a biologist gave me the grounding to translate scientific knowledge into a venture-compatible startup. My time as an operator inside VC-backed companies taught me what it takes to get through periods of growth. And consulting with a diverse portfolio of founders across verticals and impact themes brought a closeness and fulfillment that revealed the common thread: capital matters, but so do connections, relationships, networks, and partners. Seeing so many sides of this space showed me where I am most effective, most inspired, and best equipped to contribute. I see the venture side of health and life sciences as an ecosystem for advancing human potential, longevity, and prosperity, because wellbeing underlies all of it. This path felt like the most natural way to put the value I've cultivated to work, in line with my values and my commitment to human flourishing.

You're all coming to this program from outside of the Philadelphia region. What made the Science Center and Philadelphia's life sciences and healthcare ecosystem the right place to be right now?

What I appreciate most is how intelligently the Science Center, and the Philadelphia region have designed their ecosystem. It feels layered and intentional rather than scattered, which hasn't always been my experience elsewhere. That structure makes it easy to see the resources, opportunities, spaces, and collaborators available, and they are credible, accessible, and deeply connected to the broader East Coast markets of New York, Boston, and DC. That reach goes beyond life sciences and commercialization into policy and alternative routes of funding, which matters significantly in healthcare. To me, Philadelphia is a well-placed bridge connecting all of these, while keeping an identity and spirit that can't be replicated anywhere else.

You're running several workstreams this year, from portfolio embeds to a co-authored thesis on aging and longevity. Which part are you most excited to dig into?

Every part of the program intrigues me, and each one lets me show what I can do in a space I intend to contribute to for the long term. I'm looking forward to deepening my expertise across all of our work. That includes my research assignment in devices and diagnostics, growth and business support across a portfolio of wildly differing companies and bringing those practical and conceptual lessons together in an original shared thesis. I also look forward to the unexpected: the moments that come from walking alongside innovators and entrepreneurs on their own paths, and watching those relationships grow into something mutually beneficial, collaborative, and celebratory. Above all, I'm excited to build a body of work that sets me apart beyond investor readiness. I want to be an asset optimizer, whether the asset is knowledge, teams, or capital, working from a skill set that combines data, discernment, and sound frameworks that shapes my conviction on future investment decisions.

Where do you see an opportunity in health or medtech that you don't think enough people are paying attention to?

Women. And I don't mean the current Femtech paradigm of fertility, postpartum, and menopause. I mean whole-body, whole-self-care: cardiac, cognitive, metabolic, autoimmune, and beyond. Consumers' understanding of what fair, equitable, and accurate treatment of women looks like is changing. That change is opening an unprecedented opportunity for real health, one that has been hard to sustain and advocate for because of outdated regulatory norms in R&D and weak business models.

The economic case is hard to ignore. According to the World Economic Forum and McKinsey Health Institute, women live in poor health for 25 percent more of their lives than men do, and closing the women's health gap could unlock $1 trillion in annual global GDP by 2040. Capital has begun to follow. Total VC dollars going to women's health more than tripled between 2019 and 2024, outpacing healthcare, and women's health investment hit $2.6 billion in 2024, surpassing 2023's total by nearly $1 billion. The market is maturing, not just growing. Even as total venture funding cooled to around $2 billion in 2025, 14 women's health startups went public in 2025 after zero did in 2024, and 18 women's health companies were acquired.

The gaps show exactly where the whole-body opportunity lies. Cardiovascular disease, the leading cause of death in women, drew just $2 million in dedicated equity in 2025(SVB). More broadly, women's health captures just 6% of the $2.9 trillion in total private health care investment, and most of that goes to women's cancers, reproductive health, and maternal care. That is the white space.

With more and more data backing these outcomes, there are no more excuses to ignore the financial potential here, or the humanitarian responsibility to give women that optionality.

I understand why attention has lagged. Stigma, long development timelines, and funding structures that discourage the foundational research these discoveries need before commercialization all play a part. But more networks and players around the world are stepping up. The Gates Foundation committed $2.5 billion through 2030, its largest funding commitment ever to women's health, and Wellcome Leap announced a $100 million partnership with Pivotal Ventures, founded by Melinda French Gates, bringing its total women's health investment to $250 million. For those paying attention, the upside is enormous.

When you're sizing up an early-stage company, what's the first thing that gets you excited, and the first thing that gives you pause?

Excited: Quite simply, solutions that actually work. I look for validated, intelligently designed approaches that are novel and unlock a new level of restoration, rejuvenation, or eradication beyond what came before. Ideally, they are less invasive, less toxic, non-derivative, and have platform potential for expansion. In other words, genuine innovation. These companies can transform lives and improve the human condition, and they're also better positioned to generate healthy returns.

Pause: When the intention behind a business is extractive and purely economic. There's a fair case for competing in established markets. But simply re-engineering or repackaging what already exists, without advancing science, deepening our understanding of a space, or creating new outcomes, exploits a problem rather than solving it. That erodes consumer trust, pulls funding away from better work, and trades long-term health for short-term gain. These teams can look competent on paper. But when the motivation is mainly financial, they may be more likely to take shortcuts and carry risks that aren't visible up front.

My ethos is rooted in a lifelong love of science and the long-established principles and methods that make it a reliable foundation for investment. Things get muddled when venture is applied backwards, instead of mindfully as part of the innovation process.

Complete the sentence, "A year from now, I hope to..."

A year from now, I hope to see tangible results from the combined work across every part of this role and experience. I want that work to help me empower, enable, and expand the reach of the Science Center's network, while also building my own credibility as I pursue future growth across the full range of my interests.

Read the full Venture Fellows interview