Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes starts her trial for defrauding patients and investors about the company’s breakthrough, automated blood testing that never panned out.

If Theranos technology had delivered on its promises, it likely would have remained a leader in a space that’s booming. Crunchbase reports that 43 of 158 US-based at-home testing companies received funding in 2020.

Critics are concerned that when demand for Covid testing fades, broader market interest won’t hold up. Investors and makers remain bullish.

“We strongly believe diagnostics will shift to an instant, at-home, high-frequency model. We’re enabling the tracking of biomarkers through phones instead of going to a lab,” Pratik lodha, co-founder of Neodocs said in the startup’s Product Hunt launch on Friday.

Neodocs Wellness Card lets you order instant lab tests from your smartphone. Users can take a urine sample, dip their wellness card in, and after two minutes, they can scan the card with the app to reveal information about their health.

At-home testing startups do face another hurdle besides Covid (particularly female-founded ones) — they get compared regularly to Theranos.

Lola Priego is the founder of Base which offers at-home blood and saliva testing to reveal info about your sleep, stress, and diet. It launched on Product Hunt less than a year ago. She told the New York Times that she gets a Theranos comparison at least once a week. It has caused the founder some setbacks, but fortunately, concerns are usually put to rest when Priego explains that Base works with Quest Diagnostics, a multinational company, for analysis of its tests. Another startup, DotLab, battles the comparisons by explaining that it publishes its results in peer-reviewed journals, something Theranos was criticized for not doing.

Neodocs, for its part, says its Wellness Card test pads are CE and FDA-certified, and it's collaborating with IIT Bombay to perform continuous testing and validate the accuracy of the results.

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