Warning: Light movie spoilers below. Read at your own risk.
Even before becoming the stars of Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s much-buzzed-about new documentary, Elizabeth Holmes and Billy Evans were a special kind of couple. Holmes “may have ultimately failed to change the world in the way she set out,” Evans wrote in a letter at the time of Holmes’ sentencing in 2022, “but she has undeniably changed mine.” The Theranos founder, in the hardest years of her life, taught her husband “a patience” that he “would have previously dismissed as unnecessary and soft.”
She brought out his inner light, another sentencing letter from a friend of the couple reports: When they returned from a “monthslong camping trip,” Evans “displayed a new level of compassion in his demeanor, a strong sense of intention with his actions, and a heightened desire to listen to and look at others with purpose.” Whatever others might think, Evans was saying, Holmes wasn’t the only one of the pair that had been given a second chance. And they might get a second second chance with Haemanthus, a company that Evans is keen to reassure social media followers is absolutely—most definitely— “not Theranos 2.0.” A person familiar with the business told The Wall Street Journal that Holmes is not involved.
But viewers of You Can See Everything will watch Evans agreeing to the characterization that he and Holmes are making Theranos 2.0. They discuss the trajectory to make a working prototype of something on camera; they talk about collaborating on product ideas from prison. “To meet her, to spend time with her, that was the intention of the film,” the Austin, Texas-based Evans told David Friedberg, a cohost of the podcast All-In. “I haven’t seen it yet. I might think this is the dumbest thing that I have done.”
So who is Evans? And what is he building?
Long before fathering two children—son William and daughter Invicta—with Holmes, Evans grew up in San Diego in one of the city’s more prominent families, heir to midcentury pioneers in the Southern California tourism industry. His grandparents, William and Anne Evans were “two young hoteliers [who] saw the future,” according to the family’s company website, and opened up what would become a popular resort hotel on a mudflat in Mission Bay in 1953. They added a second nearby, and today own a third in La Jolla. This brought generational wealth. The business passed in part to Billy’s father, also named William.
Billy went to the Francis Parker School, one of the most prestigious private schools in the city. “The Evans family is very well respected in San Diego,” said a contemporary of Evans’ who worked for the family as a teenager, but Billy ““always a source of drama, would try to fight to start fights.” He had “affluenza” and was “just your classic spoiled rich kid” in a way that was not true of all his relatives. The inner light would come around later. (Evans did not want to be interviewed for the story and did not answer specific questions.)
After graduating from MIT with a bachelor of science in economics, Evans reportedly tried to launch a startup offering medical concierge services. This failed. He then took jobs in a handful of tech companies, including LinkedIn and Luminar Technologies, a self-driving car company. In 2017, at a “Fleet Week charity event” in the Bay Area, the then 25-year-old met Holmes and was “captivated,” he later wrote the judge at her sentencing, “by her childish wonder and authenticity.”
There was some reporting in the early years that the Evans family was not entirely enthused by this courtship, but doubts seemed to have dissipated by the time of the Holmes trial. Billy’s father, William Evans, showed up to the courtroom incognito, under the alias “Hanson,” identifying himself as a kind of mechanic. (He owns an enormous classic car collection.) To journalists, he defended Holmes’ honor. In court, he turned heads by unwrapping a “large Rice Krispies Treat” whose crinkling foil drowned out the judge on the first day of jury selection, NPR reported.
While in the film Evans and Holmes are both shown on fundraising calls, her name doesn’t appear in any of the incorporation documents of Haemanthus, the company Evans founded in 2022. There is little publicly available information on the company; to date, it has released no products and barely has a LinkedIn page, let alone a website. Yet its name can’t help but conjure up Theranos, and, indeed, its stated goal is to bring blood, urine, and saliva testing to American homes in the form of a countertop-size machine, which was more or less the goal of Theranos.
But the technology of Haemanthus seems to be a bit different than that of Theranos. Where the earlier company’s machine hoped to perfect the “miniaturization” of existing diagnostic techniques such that they could fit in a box on a counter, using a very small blood sample, Haemanthus’ machine uses “light.” To employ a cooler word, it uses lasers. The company’s Raman Spectroscopy System, a patent for which was granted January 21, 2025, suggests a machine capable of firing high-power light sources into biological samples and reading the resulting information accurately.
Raman Spectroscopy is a real and promising diagnostic tool and the subject of research since its discovery by, among others, C. V. Raman in 1928. Shine a light source at a material and perhaps one in 1 million photons will shift in frequency in relation to the molecular vibrations of the material it bounced off of. That shift can be measured and analyzed, and a century of work has gone into making this process a little easier and a little more useful, carried out today by specialists at research universities and hospitals.
It may someday be even more useful. WIRED contacted Eric Potma, a professor of chemistry at UC Irvine, to shed some light on the technology. “Given that I act as one of their consultants, I am not sure if it is appropriate for me to delve much further into this,” he wrote back. “All I can say is that from an engineering perspective, they have some interesting ideas that are worth exploring.”
“It is not a technology concept pulled out of thin air, as people may be inclined to think based on the fact that the company is run by Elizabeth’s husband (and thus an automatic repeat of the Theranos story),” he continued over email. “My own assessment is that Haemanthus is not Theranos. The engineers at Haemanthus are legit, and they are really trying to push the Raman detection technology into interesting directions.”
The challenges of putting this highly sensitive and difficult diagnostic technique into home appliances able to assess human health markers with a level of accuracy in seconds that will pass regulatory scrutiny—as promised in the company’s promotional materials—are great, though. Last year, The New York Times said that the company had garnered a $3.5 million investment from “friends and family.” It now reports as much as $20 million in funding.
Press accounts of the company’s marketing materials seem to promise investors that the company faces “no regulatory oversight,” in part because the machine would only be developed to test veterinary diseases at first. The New York Times, though, confirmed with the USDA that the agency had regulatory oversight over “vet diagnostics.”
Evans told the Times, which had other questions, that the company was “in stealth” and would remain so: “They aren’t going to find anything associated with the name Haemanthus.” There are a few things out there, among them the patent, but stealth mode continues. The addresses that turn up are mostly connected to private homes in one of Austin’s more desirable neighborhoods, near Barton Springs. Contacted by phone, a few folks who seem likely to be employees of the company declined to talk or even confirm or deny their role.
The desire for “stealth,” though, is a little discordant with the desire to participate in a yearslong documentary project with a graduate of one of Canada’s top business schools. Perhaps it will help raise money: Once the laser system is perfected, the company hopes, according to materials reviewed by the Times, to put the whole thing in a stamp-size wearable device, a research process it told investors will take “three years and $70 million.” Holmes will be reportedly moving from prison to a halfway house next summer. The world may yet be changed.
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