Elizabeth Holmes’ co-defendant and former chief operating officer of collapsed Silicon Valley startup, Theranos, surrendered himself to federal prison on Friday.
Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani, 57, was sentenced to 155 months behind bars for a dozen wire fraud and conspiracy convictions tied to his role in the once high-flying blood-testing venture founded by Holmes.
Balwani began serving out his nearly 13-year sentence at FCI Terminal Island prison in San Pedro, California. He was booked into the facility under inmate registration number 24966-111.
Holmes, who was convicted on similar felony charges, is scheduled to surrender to federal prison on April 27.
Holmes, now 38, founded the now-defunct startup in 2003 at just 19 years old, with a vision to overhaul diagnostic health care.
Balwani joined the blood-testing venture about six years later. For nearly a decade, he and Holmes sold investors on the idea of developing an analyzer — the size of a desktop printer — that purportedly could run a suite of common tests on as little as a drop or two of blood taken from a patient's finger.
The duo raised nearly $1 billion from investors before the venture shuttered in the wake of a bombshell 2015 Wall Street Journal report revealing it was not, in fact, conducting the array of blood tests from a finger prick of blood as Holmes promoted.
Prosecutors alleged that the pair used the company to defraud both investors as well as patients who paid for unreliable Theranos tests. Following their joint indictment in 2018, their trials were severed when Holmes raised allegations of abuse against her former romantic partner.
A jury in July 2022 returned guilty verdicts against Balwani on all 12 felony charges of wire fraud and conspiracy brought by the US Justice Department. His convictions followed Holmes' conviction on four of 11 counts of wire fraud reached by a separate jury in January 2022.
U.S. District Court Judge Edward Davila, who presided over both trials, based Balwani's sentence on a calculation that figured he defrauded 12 Theranos investors out of a collective $120 million.
Balwani's lawyers argued his sentence should have been more lenient than Holmes' sentence because he was her subordinate. Davila, however, challenged that contention, saying that Balwani was, at times, also a leader in the company.
Balwani, who made millions as an executive during the dot-com boom and lost millions of dollars in investments in Theranos, started dating Holmes soon after she dropped out of Stanford University at the age of 19.
Alexis Keenan is a legal reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow Alexis on Twitter @alexiskweed.
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