This is 31-year-old Elizabeth Holmes. She dropped out of Stanford when she was 19. Twelve years later, she's a billionaire. She did some regular stuff in between like founding a company and revolutionising medicine. Holmes founded her company, Theranos, with the money she had saved for college. Now, Theranos is worth $9 billion. As owner of half the company, Holmes' worth is estimated at $4.5 billion. This makes her the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world.
We hope she brings Theranos to India sooner than later. Inspired by her fear of needles and syringes, Holmes patented a new, painless method of blood analysis. Owing to the rising medical costs in the US, Holmes says one of her main concerns was to make blood tests cheaper.
Theranos does blood tests at a fraction of the market price in the US and without a syringe. It uses a painless method to prick a finger instead of puncturing a vein. Theranos claims it can perform tests on samples as small as 1/1000th of the amount of blood drawn in the usual method. They also claim that more than 30 tests can be performed on a single sample.