Purpose as a Strategy: What Adeola's Path Into Healthcare VC Reveals

Breaking into venture capital rarely follows a straight line. For a GoingVC Alumni, currently pre-seed investor at a healthcare-focused VC firm, the path began not with a finance degree or a network of connections, but with a childhood spent noticing something most people don’t pay attention to — that the hospital on one side of the neighborhood looked nothing like the one on the other.

"Healthcare is my passion, and venture is the medium in which I can exercise that passion," she said.

That clarity of purpose, she argues, is something the industry doesn’t seem to get much credit for.

Healthcare venture capital is currently a space defined by consolidation and conviction. After a steep decline in 2022 that saw digital health funding drop by half, 2024 saw an 18% year-over-year rebound in U.S. healthcare VC — but dollars concentrated in far fewer deals. That consolidation has a practical implication for investors at every level: generalist enthusiasm is no longer enough. Only thesis-aligned categories attract capital, with AI-driven diagnostics, metabolic care, and value-based platforms receiving roughly 69% of dollars raised.

At the pre-seed level specifically, the conditions are even more demanding. Early-stage financing for health tech declined 22% in 2024, with $1.5 billion invested across 212 deals compared to $2.3 billion across 262 deals in 2023. Fewer dollars, fewer deals, and investors expecting founders to do more with less. The median seed round in healthcare saw a 30% dip to $2 million in Q4 2024, a sign that investors are being more deliberate about not over-capitalizing companies at the earliest stages.

This is the environment in which Adeola’s doing her work. And it is precisely why the kind of domain clarity she brings — rooted not in market maps but in lived experience — is something the industry increasingly needs from its investors as much as its founders.

Purpose-Driven Fit

The piece of career advice that circulates most in VC circles tends to focus on credentials and connections. Getting the right internship, building the right network. These things matter, and the data bears some of it out —

But what the data cannot fully capture is something Adeola's story illustrates well: the investors who develop a durable edge tend to be those who bring a specific, substantive reason for being in the room. Not just credentials that qualify them, but a perspective that shapes how they see deals. Call it purpose-driven fit — the alignment between why you entered the industry, what you actually know, and the kinds of problems you are best positioned to recognize.

For Adeola, that fit runs through health equity and access. It is not a positioning choice. It is the thing that pulled her into the work in the first place.

The Path

Adeola grew up in West Philadelphia, surrounded by healthcare professionals and, simultaneously, by evidence of how unevenly the health system distributes its resources. She always found that gap interesting — and troubling. By high school, she knew clinical work was perhaps not her path. But the questions stayed with her.

At Emory University as a Human Health major, she found a curriculum built around those questions — epidemiology, sociology, anthropology, and the humanities of health rather than a standard pre-med or public health track. A concentration in health innovation through the business school introduced her to venture capital and impact investing. She realized that the two things she cared about — healthcare and the ability to do something concrete about it — could actually fit together.

"Healthcare is my passion, and venture is the medium in which I can exercise that passion," she said.

She is quick to note that none of this came with a map. She was not someone who grew up knowing what VC was, who had a mentor already in the industry, or who was positioned to receive warm introductions.

"If you had told me four years ago that this was what I would be doing, I'd be like, that doesn't even make any sense. What is that?"

What She's Actually Investing In

At Seae Ventures, Adeola works at the pre-seed stage — the earliest, least certain, and arguably most interesting slice of the market. The companies she finds most compelling tend not to be the ones chasing the largest addressable markets or building the flashiest technology. They are the ones starting with a specific friction in the healthcare experience and working backward from it.

Clinical workflow management has been a recurring theme. This can sound administrative from the outside, but the downstream effects are significant. She has encountered companies helping oncologists manage clinical trial notes more efficiently, and others building tools for radiologists to transcribe and communicate findings in ways that are faster and easier for other providers to act on. The goal in both cases is not to make medicine faster — it is to give physicians back the time and attention that should be going to their patients.

AI now represents 46% of all healthcare investment, with the largest concentration going to ambient documentation and AI-assisted clinical tools. Adeola's read on this is measured. She is genuinely excited about what technology can do for the administrative burden on clinicians, but she is also watching closely for the cases where it has done the opposite.

"Taking the burden off of doctors when it comes to the administrative tasks, so that they can really be present with their patient — I think that should be the number one goal."

The other category that animates her work is access — companies finding ways to bring care to people rather than expecting people to navigate a system designed around their absence. One company is training barbers and hair stylists to conduct basic health screenings in the spaces their communities already trust. Another enabled nurse practitioners to launch their own online clinical practices, handling credentialing, billing, and scheduling end-to-end, in areas where physician access is limited. A third focused on non-emergency medical transportation — the quiet, underappreciated problem of simply getting to a regular appointment when you do not have reliable transit.

"We need to get back to the basics in a lot of ways," she said. "Other people don't have a PCP. Like, let's start there."

In 2024, 63% of digital health funding rounds went to Seed, Series A, and Series B stages
— a sign that the structural interest in early-stage health innovation is real, even as individual round sizes have contracted. The opportunity Adeola is working in is genuinely alive. The question, as always at this stage, is who is asking the right questions about it.

What She Looks for in Founders

At the pre-seed stage, the data is limited. That shifts a significant portion of the diligence toward founder assessment, and Adeola has a specific view of what that means in healthcare.

Domain expertise matters more here than in most other sectors. Founders who have worked inside health systems — who understand how payer relationships are built, how partnerships with health systems actually happen, what regulatory pathways look like from the inside — bring a compounding advantage that is difficult to replicate from a market research report. She is candid that her firm tends to be cautious with very early-stage founders who are new to the healthcare world, regardless of how compelling the idea appears.

But domain expertise and interpersonal effectiveness are not the same thing, and she pushes back on the assumption that intelligence is a sufficient proxy for leadership.

"You may be super smart, but your people skills aren't there. Your leadership skills may not be the best. And those are all really big components of being a founder."

She has seen it play out poorly within a single year: a strong idea, a technically capable founder, but a person who was not suited to the leadership demands of the role. Investors grew uncomfortable. A co-founder left. Interpersonal friction spread into the organization. The idea survived; the company struggled. Her point is that these are not soft considerations. These are operational risks.

The Hard Lesson: Consensus Is Not Bureaucracy

One of the more honest things Adeola shared was about what it feels like to lose a deal you believed in.

Early in her time at Seae Ventures, she championed a company she was genuinely excited about. She had a personal connection to the work, conviction in the founder, and had put significant effort into the analysis. The investment committee did not get there. They could not find conviction around the market sizing and passed.

Her GP offered a perspective that stayed with her: a pass at IC is not a judgment on her judgment or on the founder's ability. It is a judgment about whether the whole firm is ready to make this bet together.

That reframe led to a more durable lesson. A single champion inside a firm may not be enough, but a company that enters a portfolio with only one advocate will feel that over time — in the board attention it receives, in the warm introductions it does or does not get, in the patience extended when things are hard. The goal is not to win the argument. It is to bring everyone along.

"My job is to get every single person on board next time."

What She Would Tell the People Coming Up Behind Her

Adeola's advice is to find a niche. Build real knowledge in it — not talking-point familiarity but the kind of understanding that makes your colleagues turn to you when a deal comes through. For her, that niche is maternal health and health policy. It is how she adds value in interviews and how she contributes to deals in ways that are not interchangeable with what anyone else on the team offers.

The advice she wishes she had received before she started is simpler, and perhaps more transferable than any framework.

"You're not behind. You can't be behind in your own life. It's literally impossible to be behind if you're the only person in the race."

Looking Outward

Beyond her immediate work, Adeola is encouraged by developments at the edges of the VC ecosystem — the growth of investment activity in sub-Saharan Africa, and the way underrepresented founders and investors in the U.S. are building their own structures in response to persistent gaps in access to capital. Affinity spaces, focused funds, targeted events. These communities, she says, have been building quietly and with real purpose.

In healthcare specifically, her optimism is conditional but genuine. The technology being built right now has the potential to make medicine more human — to free physicians from the documentation burden that has, in many settings, effectively removed them from the room. Whether that potential is realized or rationalized away will depend in large part on the values of the people making the investment decisions.

That is not a small thing to get right. It is, in many ways, the whole point.

Special thanks to Adeola for her generosity in sharing her perspective and career story. The venture capital community benefits when investors who found their way in through unconventional paths are willing to talk openly about how they did it — and why it matters who is in the room.

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