Elizabeth Holmes's partner and father of her children, William "Billy" Evans, is starting his own blood-testing company and is seeking investors, according to the New York Times.
Some say the new company sounds eerily similar to Theranos, the failed blood-testing startup through which founder Holmes defrauded investors and patients and is now serving prison time for those crimes.
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Tech experts in Silicon Valley were stunned at the audacity of the new startup, which reportedly promises to make a medical diagnosis in veterinary medicine first, with potential for human applications in the future.
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SIGN UP Evans, who has deep ties to San Diego, according to published reports, is the son of Bill Evans, whose Evans Hotels family holdings include the luxury resorts the Catamaran Resort & Spa, in Pacific Beach; The Lodge at Torrey Pines; and Bahia Resort, in Mission Bay.
Billy Evans reportedly has raised millions of dollars from investors for the startup called Haemanthus.
"It’s got so many corollaries to the Theranos model," tech consultant Tim Bajarin of Creative Strategies Inc. said.
Bajarin tracked Theranos from its 2003 launch through the fraud convictions two decades later that brought the company down. Now he's watching as Evans pitches Haemanthus to investors.
"I can’t say they’re not going to get funding, but it’s going to be highly scrutinized because of the link to Theranos," Bajarin said.
In January 2022, Holmes was convicted of defrauding investors and patients with a blood-testing technology she knew was unsuccessful and yet continued to pitch and sell on a broad scale. In November 2022, she was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison and ordered to repay investors more than $450 million.
Long-time Silicon Valley business and tech journalist Kym McNicholas now operates an education and advocacy association supporting patients with peripheral artery disease. She questions the audacity of such a startup that Holmes could one day benefit from financially.
"There are millions of lives at stake with every one of these medical companies, and you just can’t show any kind of leniency when it comes to someone’s life or limb," McNicholas said. "I think if anyone is going to be backed by the change that she originally wanted to see, it should not be her husband, and she should not inherently benefit from any success that the technology now has."
Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals denied Holmes a new trial. Her last hope for a new trial now rests with a possible appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
NBC 7's Eric S. Page contributed to this report — Ed.
