A US court upheld the conviction of the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes for defrauding investors out of hundreds of millions of dollars while operating her failed blood-testing startup, once valued at $9bn, rejecting her multi-year appeal.
The court also upheld the conviction of Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, once Holmes’s romantic partner and president of Theranos.
Holmes claimed that the Edison could perform a wide swath of medical tests with a single drop of a patient’s blood, which would have represented a significant advance in biotechnology.
Holmes’s sentence has been reduced by more than two years for good behavior while incarcerated, and she is expected to be released in 2032, having served a nine-year sentence.
A US attorney disagreed and in an initial hearing on the appeal in 2024, said that “it was not really contested that the device did not work,” referring to Theranos’s error-prone Edison blood-testing machine.
