Controversial $9 billion health startup Theranos may be raising another $200 million
Thomson Reuters
Theranos has raised an undisclosed total sum of venture capital funding, though multiple reports indicate that the company has raised somewhere around $400 million since its 2003 founding.
According to Fortune, Theranos filed new paperwork in Delaware, just days before an explosive Wall Street Journal was published earlier this month. Theranos' board of directors approved the Series C-3 stock authorization filing back in September.
Theranos has few investors whose identities have been made public; those include Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Larry Ellison, and ATA Ventures. Thanks to Fortune, however, we now know of several more previously undisclosed Theranos investors, including BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, Continental Properties Co., Esoom Enterprise (Taiwan), Jupiter Partners, Palmieri Trust, Partner Fund Management, Dixon Doll, Ray Bingham and B.J. Cassin.
Theranos may have raised as much as $750 million in total, and that's before even taking into account any capital it could raise from the new share authorization.
From Fortune:
It is important to note that authorized shares have not necessarily been issued or sold. For example, other filings show that Theranos authorized the sale of 11.7 million "Series C-2" shares at $17 a piece back in February 2014. It then increased that amount this past January to a whopping 58.8 million shares at the same $17 per share price. But shortly thereafter, Theranos said in a different filing that it only had issued a total of 32.2 million of the authorized Series C-2 stock. [...]
The Journal's initial report alleged that Theranos is struggling to make its 'revolutionary' in-house technology actually work, and reports that only about 10% of Theranos' blood tests use its technology, with the rest of the tests being carried out using traditional blood-testing tech. Even the company's own employees have concerns about Theranos' blood tests.
Since the report came out, Theranos has defended itself both onstage at the WSJ's WSJDLive Conference, as well as in a slightly more thorough report on its website.
Earlier this week, the FDA released some heavily redacted notes from a visit it took to Theranos' labs earlier this year. They don't look great - investigators essentially concluded from their visit that there wasn't strong enough evidence that Theranos' device was doing what it was supposed to. Founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes also recently announced she'd share the company's data by opening it up to peer review, but has yet to reveal when that will happen.
There has also been a shakeup of Theranos' board of directors, which was composed of high-profile individuals - like Henry A. Kissinger and George P. Shultz - but few medical experts. All the members of Theranos' former board of directors have been moved to a new group which will continue to advise the startup, called a "board of counselors," according to the Times. In addition to its board of directors and board of counselors, Theranos has also created an another board "to give medical advice." Holmes told the Times that all these changes happened this summer, though its website listed both Kissinger and Shultz as on its board of directors as of yesterday, though it was updated on Thursday.
We've reached out to Theranos for comment on this story and will update if we hear back.
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