Founder of 'revolutionary' US blood-testing startup once valued at $9bn charged with fraud

Theranos was established by Elizabeth Holmes in 2003 when she was just a 19-year-old Stanford drop out. Within a year it had won $6m (£4.5m) backing from investors attracted by Ms Holmes’s desire to disrupt the industry monopoly over blood tests – and she was toasted as a rising star of Silicon Valley. Ms Holmes and Mr Balwani claimed the Theranos analyser could perform a full range of clinical tests using tiny blood samples drawn from a finger stick, asserting that its results were more accurate, reliable and faster than those from conventional blood tests.