There was a pretty great article a few years ago about the downfall of 23andMe (I think it was in The Atlantic), but basically they ran through all of their potential customers within a few years. It turns out that when your entire business is sequencing someone’s dna it’s hard to get repeat customers. They tried to pivot to a subscription model where they would give health advice based on your genetic sequence, but it turns out that most health information you can glean from a dna is suspect at best and next to useless most of the time.
Well, think about it: it was a novelty in 2013. I paid them $99, and I still have access to all of the website's features, showing my ancestry and health trivia. People who are into this sort of thing have already done it. What future revenue do they have?
Why would a B2C blood test company need to be publicly traded?
The answer is simple: going public is a cheat code that unlocks millions in cash for deeply unprofitable companies that can sell tall tales to pension funds that need things to toss money at. Coat it in some "we're a tech company" pixie dust to seal the deal.
Any “deeply unprofitable” company that goes public without at least any bright future forecast will get their share price hammered right after the IPO, or would probably cancel the IPO since the underwritten target IPO price would be too low. This has happened.
There is no “conspiracy” cheat code here, the reason they went public is to satisfy their pre IPO VC investors. The snowball just continues roll at that point.
They had over $1B of total investments prior to their IPO so the pressure to go public was clear.
If SPACs aren't a money cheat code, what are they? A real company puts out an S-1 to gauge market sentiment, and doesn't hide them behind a Richard Branson investment vehicle.
> 23andMe isn’t doing a traditional IPO, but rather following the popular trend of using a SPAC (Special Purpose Acquisition Company), a blank-check company formed solely for the purpose of raising capital through an initial public offering, in this case run by Virgin founder and billionaire Richard Branson.
