Theranos – Silicon Valley’s Greatest Disaster

Theranos, what seemed like one of the most ground breaking companies of the 21st century ended up being one of Silicon Valley’s greatest failures. How did Elizabeth Holmes manage to fool the world?
Theranos was an American privately held corporation that was touted as a breakthrough health technology company. The company claimed that it devised blood tests that required very small amounts of blood and could be performed rapidly, thanks to the small automated devices the company had developed. However, these claims were later proven to be false.
Founded in 2003 by 19-year-old Elizabeth Holmes, Theranos raised more than US$700 million from venture capitalists and private investors,[7] resulting in a $10 billion valuation at its peak in 2013 and 2014.
A turning point came in 2015, when medical research professor John Ioannidis, and later Eleftherios Diamandis, along with investigative journalist John Carreyrou of The Wall Street Journal, questioned the validity of Theranos’s technology.