The former CEO of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, and his partner, Billy Evans, following an audience at the Robert E. Peckham court on March 17, 2023 in San Jose, California. Evans has collected millions of dollars for a new startup in health technology on which Holmes advises it.
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The partner of the founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, collected millions of dollars for an artificial intelligence startup in the hope of introducing a product that can be used in medical tests and other parameters, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the effort which could not speak publicly because the company has not yet been officially launched. The company is called Hanthus, who is Greek for the “flower of blood”.
Holmes, a former Silicon Valley star, is serving an 11 -year sentence in the federal prison for having deceived investors about his blood test startup Theranos, formerly announced as a breakthrough in laboratory sciences before her basic technology was proved to be defective.
Since he was imprisoned in a federal installation in Bryan, Texas, Holmes has provided advice to his partner, Billy Evans, on the startup, according to sources. The precise nature of support for Evans de Holmes in the company is not clear.
A dozen people are part of the startup. Some of those who work on the company previously worked with Evans at Luminar Technologies, which develops sensors for autonomous vehicles, according to the company’s documents and the incorporation of the company’s Delaware. Evans has collected funds mainly with friends, family and other supporters so far, according to one of the sources.
The support of Holmes to the foray of her partner in Biotech is striking, since she is serving a federal prison sentence in this same area.
During her criminal trial of almost four months, Holmes insisted that she had not committed any crime, despite the evidence presented by the government and the testimony of testimonies suggesting that she deliberately deceived investors and tried to cover it, shortly after being plastered on the covers of the magazines and made comparisons to Steve Jobs.
From prison, Holmes continues to fight. On Thursday, a federal court of appeal confirmed his conviction.
Holmes, the mother of two, appointed one of her children Invicta, Latin for “invincible”.
In addition to the condemnation for fraud of Holmes, a separate investigation of the Securities and Exchange Commission led him to be prohibited from serving as an officer or director of a public company for a decade as part of a regulation of March 2018. The prohibition does not affect its ability to help manage a private enterprise, but a familiar source with Hanthus declared that it was not planning to play an official role to help Evans.
However, she composes a post-prison return to the health care industry.
Holmes said People Magazine in February that she intends to resume her career in biotechnology when she was released from prison and that she wrote patents for new inventions when he was behind bars.
Hanthus refused to comment. A Holmes lawyer did not respond to a request for comments.
Hanthus is at its beginnings, according to a person knowing the company. Currently, the company uses light detection technology which can essentially guide AI sensors to carry out medical tests, according to the source and a patent that the company was granted in January.
The company focuses on something called Raman spectroscopy, which has proven to help diagnose ALS, also called Lou Gehrig’s disease, as well as certain forms of cancer. It was also used to discover improvised explosive devices on the battlefields.
Hanthus hopes to reduce the cost of technology and remove it from research laboratories to make it commercially accessible to patients, although the potential consumer product would really look in development.
The company’s January patent said that the light detection tool can be used to test “biological materials”, citing examples, including sweat, urine, saliva. Technology can also carry out diagnostic tests using a small blood sample.
