SummerBio LLC, the Covid-19 testing startup that recently laid off all its employees, is going into "standby mode," the company announced Monday.
The startup had appeared to be headed for a closure after it laid off all 101 of its workers last month and closed its laboratory at 185 Constitution Dr. in Menlo Park.
The company, which landed on Bay Area Inno's collection of Startups to Watch earlier this year, provided fast, automated PCR testing to school districts and other institutions. But now the company has decided to store its high-volume instruments and testing machines in a holding cell, in case they need to be activated in the event of another Covid surge, it disclosed in a news release.
"As we move into a new phase of this pandemic where Covid is causing far fewer hospitalizations and deaths, the demand for PCR testing has shifted," Sasha Seletsky, co-founder and chief business officer of SummerBio, said in the release. "Public health authorities are moving away from large-scale PCR screening programs and asking individuals to access testing through their healthcare providers or by using home-based antigen tests."
Since its founding in the summer of 2020, a few months after Covid-19 began to spread, SummerBio was able to quickly scale and would eventually serve more than 1,000 schools, charging $13 per test, according to the release. The startup processed about 20 million samples, with the majority of results returned in less than 24 hours.
"SummerBio was created in response to the pandemic and the lack of available testing," Dave Scheinman, SummerBio's co-founder and president, said in the release. "With a mission of providing high-volume, low-cost, automated PCR testing, we were able to quickly roll out surveillance testing programs allowing schools and businesses to reopen safely."
