Billy Evans’ ‘Theranos 2.0’ startup has patents, investors, and a missing CTO—but no product
As You Can See Everything turns Billy Evans into the year’s most unlikely documentary villain, his Austin startup Haemanthus faces a simple question: What has it built?
Billy Evans, a 34-year-old grandson of Evans Hotels founders, is the CEO of Haemanthus, an Austin-based startup that claims to use lasers to detect diseases in blood, saliva, and urine. After being featured in a recent documentary about his wife Elizabeth Holmes, attention has shifted to Evans and his company. Haemanthus has reportedly raised up to $20 million in funding, and holds at least one granted patent, but it currently lacks a commercial product or validated diagnostic results.
The company's technology, Raman spectroscopy, is not novel, but Haemanthus claims its approach is fundamentally different from Theranos' methods. A patent related to the technology was granted in January 2025, and early employees, including the former CTO, worked together at Luminar Technologies, a lidar startup that went bankrupt in 2025.
Evans, who met Holmes at a party in 2017, is not an employee or shareholder of Evans Hotels, and his LinkedIn profile has removed all jobs except Haemanthus. He and Holmes have two children. Haemanthus plans to start with veterinary testing before pursuing human applications, but the company has not yet launched a product or disclosed any independently validated diagnostic results.
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