Billy Evans’ ‘Theranos 2.0’ startup has patents, investors, and a missing CTO—but no product
Fortune Bilin Lin
Billy Evans’ startup says lasers can spot disease in blood, saliva, and urine. It has investors and a patent, but no public product or proof it works—and its CTO is gone.
Based on reporting by Fortune, Bilin Lin — read the original for the full story.
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Billy Evans is suddenly getting documentary-era fame, but the real story is the company he runs in Austin. Haemanthus says it can use lasers to detect disease in blood, saliva and urine. The startup has reportedly pulled in as much as $20 million and has at least one granted patent. Publicly, though, it still has no product customers can buy and no published data showing the tech works.
That gap is why the Theranos comparisons stick. Haemanthus says its method is different from Elizabeth Holmes’ old scam: not a miniaturized version of existing lab tests, but Raman spectroscopy paired with AI. The science is real in the abstract. Raman tools already help investigators identify substances, and labs can use them through plastic or glass. But blood is a messier target, and weak signals can get buried by everything else in the sample.
Evans, 34, is not just Holmes’ partner from the documentary. He’s the grandson of the founders of Evans Hotels in San Diego, though the family company says he is neither an employee nor a shareholder. He graduated from MIT in 2015, worked at LinkedIn, then spent time at Luminar Technologies before moving on to Haemanthus. His LinkedIn now shows only the startup.
The money trail is also murky but not empty. Investor materials reviewed by The New York Times last year said Haemanthus had raised $3.5 million from friends and family, then went back to wealthy investors in Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area for another $15 million. WIRED has since reported as much as $20 million total. Those same materials sketched a wearable human device that would take three years and $70 million to build.
Haemanthus says it will start with veterinary testing, where regulation is lighter, before moving toward humans. That sounds like a sensible place to begin. It also sounds a lot like a company still looking for a place where its claims can survive contact with reality. The recent CTO exit only makes the picture look shakier.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the oldest Silicon Valley trick in the book: wrap a hard scientific problem in glossy language, then call the skepticism unfair. A patent and a pitch deck are not a medical device, and “Theranos 2.0” is not a compliment no matter how many investor calls it appears on. The boring part is the important part here: proof, data, and a product that exists outside a promo cycle.
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