Color Health evolves beyond gene testing kits

Editor's note: As part of the Bay Area Inno Awards, the San Francisco Business Times and Silicon Valley Business Journal are highlighting nine startups from nine categories across the innovation space. We chose these firms based on their ability to fundamentally change the game in their respective fields, grow quickly and durably and develop useful products to solve compelling problems. Here's the honoree in the healthtech category.

Color Health is thinking bigger these days.

The Burlingame startup was originally a consumer health tech company but over the past two years has evolved its mission to expand access to health care.

The company was founded by Othman Laraki, Elad Gil, Nish Bhat and Taylor Sittler in 2013 to develop at-home genetic testing kits that can be used for detecting diseases like cancer. The mission was personal for Laraki. His family has dealt with BRCA2 gene mutations which can lead to breast cancer.

Over the past couple of years, though, it “has evolved into something very different” than they had originally imagined, Laraki said.

In 2020, the team watched as the world responded to the emerging threat of Covid-19, and they wondered if they should do something to help. So they spent a few weeks trying to learn about the virus from a science-based lens and quickly realized that there was another issue brewing beyond a need to develop the technology and tests that this new pandemic demanded. Access to these public health interventions was equally important.

“You need to reach not only the wealthy white collar people in big cities but also people working in farms or underserved communities, and oftentimes that’s actually the harder problem but also one where we felt we had the unique capability and approach to make a difference,” Laraki said.

Laraki and Gil had worked together before. They also co-founded geolocation software company Mixer Labs in 2008; it was acquired by Twitter a year later for $25 million, according to PitchBook.

Born in Jerusalem, Gil is one of Silicon Valley’s most prolific solo venture capitalists. In 2021, he was reportedly raising a $620 million fund, according to a report from The Information at the time, rivaling some much larger firms. According to PitchBook, he has continued investing across all stages since stepping down as Color’s CEO in 2016. He remains on Color’s board.

Laraki was born in Casablanca, Morocco, and moved to Silicon Valley in 1996 to attend Stanford University, where he studied computer science and has spent the past couple of decades working on consumer related technology.

“Always kind of focusing on applications and services that serve a lot of people with an orientation around using technology but to serve large populations and to simplify how we interact with our environments,” Laraki said.

Laraki has been Color’s CEO for the past six years.

The pandemic was a watershed moment for Laraki and Color’s leadership team, who have been steadily pivoting the company into its new, broader mission of expanding access to health care.

The company was among the first to develop Covid-19 testing supplies and it helped the city of San Francisco set up its first drive-thru testing site in early 2020. That partnership led to others with government agencies and private employers around the state. And by late 2021, Color was processing more than 90% of tests collected from public testing sites in San Francisco, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. And it was doing it more quickly than other labs.

In April, Color signed a 14-month contract with the state of California to manage and provide laboratory services that’s worth up to $300 million through June 2023, according to public documents.

Under the terms of the contract, the state will pay $30 for each Covid-19 test processed plus $5 per sample that it handles, among other potential fees. It will also pay Color monthly management fees ranging from $412,500 to $2.43 million depending on the number of tests processed, as well as an annual $2.25 million fee to continuously access Color’s platform and APIs.

And last year, Color started working with a coalition of Black churches in California to expand access to services including HIV and STI testing, vaccinations and covid testing.

“That really is where I think our biggest contribution has been is to reach all of these people, millions of people who otherwise don’t interact with the health system at all,” Laraki said. “It’s about making health care not just available but accessible.”

Color Health