Billy Evans, the husband of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, is trying to build a diagnostics company that he insists is “not Theranos 2.0.” The Austin-based venture, Haemanthus, was founded in 2022 and aims to bring blood, urine, and saliva testing into American homes via a countertop machine. Unlike Theranos’ miniaturized blood tests, Haemanthus plans to use Raman spectroscopy—a real diagnostic technique that fires high-power light into samples and reads the frequency shifts of scattered photons.
Public information about Haemanthus is scarce. It has released no products, has barely a LinkedIn page, and no website. Yet a patent for its Raman Spectroscopy System was granted on January 21, 2025, suggesting the company is moving toward a working prototype. A person familiar with the business told The Wall Street Journal that Holmes is not involved, and her name does not appear in incorporation documents. Still, the WIRED documentary “You Can See Everything” shows Evans and Holmes on fundraising calls and discussing product ideas, including from prison.
Evans comes from a wealthy San Diego family and studied economics at MIT. He previously tried a medical concierge startup that failed, then worked at LinkedIn and self-driving car company Luminar Technologies. He met Holmes in 2017 and later wrote that she taught him patience. The couple has two children. Haemanthus’ stated goal—home testing via a countertop device—inevitably echoes Theranos, and Evans has tried to distance himself from that comparison, even as the film leans into it. The company’s technology appears genuinely different, but with no products and a heavy dose of skepticism, the business case remains unproven.