- General
- June 8, 2019
- 5 minutes read
23andMe Reportedly Made $475 Million Last Year
23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful Women 23andMe is popularly known for its $99 direct-to-consumer DNA…
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| 23andMe CEO Anne Wojcicki
Photograph by Stuart Isett/Fortune Most Powerful Women
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23andMe is popularly known for its $99 direct-to-consumer DNA test kit that provides its users with information on their ancestry as wells as some health tips. The company is backed by the likes of Sequoia Capital, GlaxoSmithKline, Fidelity, GV( formerly Google Ventures), New Enterprise Associates and Altimeter Capital, with nearly $800 million in total funding.
A recent Forbes profile of its CEO Anne Wojcicki reported that 23andMe recorded an estimated $475 million in revenue last year, with nearly 5 million customers making use of its $99 DNA kit during the year. The report cites no source so that number can be taken as a guesstimate. Nevertheless, that’ll be quite impressive for 23andMe, although the company is not currently profitable. 23andMe was last valued at $2.5 billion after pharma giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) invested $300 million in the company mid-last year.
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| Sequoia partner Roelof Botha. Botha is a board member at 23andMe.
Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch
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The investment came as part of a four-year strategic partnership that involves both companies working on R&D for new medicines and potential cures, aided by 23andMe’s massive DNA library. 23andMe is sharing in drug-development costs related to the partnership, but will also share in any profits realized from them. There’s also an option to extend the partnership to a fifth year
23andMe caught on with greatly lowered costs of genetic sequencing (down 99% in a decade) which makes it easier for the company to extract info from DNA samples. 23andMe is currently armed with the world’s largest genetic research database and aims to leverage that to indicate genetic proneness to some diseases and also help in creating drugs that’ll treat them.
But even with grand plans, there are still doubts from the medical community concerning indications of susceptibility to diseases from direct-to-consumer kits like 23andMe’s. In fact, 23andMe’s kits clearly state they are “not intended to tell you anything about your current state of health, or to be used to make medical decisions.” In simpler terms, the company’s kits aren’t permitted to deliver any definitive diagnoses.
