23andMe
23andMe Research Institute is an American personal genomics and biotechnology company based in Palo Alto, California, now operating as a nonprofit public benefit corporation. It provides a direct-to-consumer genetic testing service in which customers submit a saliva sample that is analysed by single-nucleotide polymorphism genotyping to generate reports on ancestry and genetic predisposition to health conditions. The company is named for the 23 pairs of chromosomes in a diploid human cell.
| 23andMe Research Institute | |
|---|---|
| Type | Nonprofit public benefit corporation |
| Industry | Personal genomics, biotechnology |
| Founded | 2006, Mountain View, California |
| Founder | Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey, Paul Cusenza |
| Headquarters | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Area served | United States, Canada, United Kingdom and other markets |
| Key people | Joe Selsavage (chief executive from 2025) |
| Products | Personal Genome Service, ancestry and health reports |
| Services | Genetic testing, research services, telehealth (Lemonaid Health) |
| Parent | TTAM Research Institute |
| Website | 23andme.com |
Founded in 2006, 23andMe was the first company to offer autosomal DNA testing for ancestry, the approach now standard across the industry. Its saliva test was named Invention of the Year by Time in 2008. The company's history has been shaped by two forces in tension: an extraordinary research asset built from more than 14 million genotyped individuals, and a consumer business that never found a way to earn recurring revenue from a test most customers take once.
That tension resolved badly. After going public in 2021 at a peak market capitalisation of approximately six billion dollars, the company's valuation fell to roughly two per cent of that figure by 2024. It suffered a data breach affecting 6.9 million users in 2023, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in March 2025, and was acquired out of bankruptcy by a nonprofit founded by its own ousted chief executive.
History
Founding and early growth, 2006 to 2017
Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey and Paul Cusenza founded 23andMe in 2006 to offer genetic testing and interpretation directly to individuals. Investment documents from 2007 indicate that the founders also intended from the outset to build a research database, a dual purpose that would define the company.
In 2007 Google invested 3.9 million dollars alongside Genentech, New Enterprise Associates and Mohr Davidow Ventures. Wojcicki was married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin at the time, a connection that attracted comment then and later. Cusenza left the company in 2007 and Avey departed in 2009, leaving Wojcicki as the sole remaining founder and the public face of the business.
The company raised 50 million dollars in a Series D round in 2012, nearly doubling its total capital of 52.6 million dollars. A 115 million dollar Series E in 2015 brought the total to 241 million dollars, and by late 2017 approximately 250 million dollars had been raised at a valuation of 1.75 billion dollars.
GlaxoSmithKline partnership, 2018 to 2023
On 25 July 2018 the company announced a partnership with GlaxoSmithKline under which the pharmaceutical group would use data from consenting customers to support drug development, investing 300 million dollars. The arrangement made explicit what had been implicit in the business model: the genetic database, not the test kits, was the asset of real value.
The partnership produced its first clinical trial in July 2020, a jointly developed cancer therapy. In January 2022 it was extended to July 2023 with a further 50 million dollar payment.
Public listing and Lemonaid, 2020 to 2021
The company was based in Mountain View, California, first in North Bayshore and then downtown, until moving to larger premises in Sunnyvale in 2019. In January 2020 it laid off about 100 employees in its consumer testing division, an early signal of weakness in the core business.
A Series F round in December 2020 raised approximately 82.5 million dollars, bringing total funding above 850 million dollars. In February 2021 23andMe announced a merger with VG Acquisition Corp, the special-purpose acquisition company sponsored by Richard Branson, in a transaction valuing it at 3.5 billion dollars. The merger closed in June 2021 and the combined entity, renamed 23andMe Holding Co., began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker ME.
In October 2021 the company acquired Lemonaid Health, a telehealth provider, for 400 million dollars, closing in November. The purchase was intended to give 23andMe a recurring revenue stream and a route from genetic insight to clinical care.
Decline and bankruptcy, 2022 to 2025
After reaching a market capitalisation of approximately six billion dollars, the share price fell steadily. By early 2024 the company was worth roughly two per cent of its peak. The causes were structural: persistent unprofitability and the absence of recurring revenue from a one-time DNA test kit. Once a customer has been genotyped, there is little reason to buy again.
Wojcicki made repeated attempts to take the company private. An initial bid of 2.53 dollars a share in February 2024 did not proceed. In July 2024 she offered 40 cents a share for all stock she did not already own, and a special committee of the board rejected it. In September 2024 all seven independent directors resigned simultaneously, an extraordinary event that reflected the breakdown of relations between the board and a founder holding supervoting shares. The company subsequently filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicating that it was no longer open to third-party acquisition offers.
Customers attempting to delete their genetic data at this point discovered that the company retained it for three years to meet legal obligations, a disclosure that intensified public concern about what would happen to the database if the company failed. Further layoffs followed in November 2024.
In January 2025 the company disclosed that it needed additional liquidity and was exploring strategic alternatives including a sale. Wojcicki made a third offer of 41 cents a share in March. On 23 March 2025 23andMe filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection to sell its assets, listing assets and liabilities each between 100 million and 500 million dollars. Wojcicki stepped down as chief executive and was replaced by the chief financial officer Joe Selsavage. Trading was suspended on 31 March and the stock was delisted from Nasdaq, moving to over-the-counter trading.
The California attorney general Rob Bonta issued a consumer privacy alert reminding Californians of their right to request deletion of their genetic data, a rare instance of a state law officer intervening in a corporate bankruptcy on privacy grounds.
TTAM acquisition, 2025
The initial bankruptcy auction was won by Regeneron Pharmaceuticals with a bid of 256 million dollars, under which it would have acquired every part of 23andMe except Lemonaid Health. The bankruptcy court then reopened the auction after Wojcicki argued that her nonprofit, the TTAM Research Institute, had been unfairly excluded from the bidding. In the final round TTAM bid 305 million dollars and won.
TTAM completed the acquisition of substantially all assets, including the Personal Genome Service, Research Services and Lemonaid Health, on 14 July 2025. It committed to honouring the existing privacy policies, establishing a Consumer Privacy Advisory Board, and restricting any future sale or transfer of genetic data unless a new owner adopted equivalent protections. The company had separately announced that it would cease to be a public company and deregister from the SEC with effect from 6 June 2025.
The outcome left the company operating as a nonprofit under the control of the founder who had been unable to take it private as a public company, an unusual resolution that critics characterised as achieving through bankruptcy what shareholders had refused to permit.
Technology
23andMe began offering direct-to-consumer testing in November 2007. Customers submit a saliva sample from which DNA is extracted and amplified. The amplified DNA is applied to a glass microarray chip manufactured by Illumina, carrying microscopic beads each bearing a gene probe complementary to a specific variant. Where the customer's DNA matches a probe the sequences hybridise, and a fluorescent label indicates the variant is present.
The platform tests hundreds of thousands of variants out of the approximately 10 to 30 million present in the human genome. This is genotyping rather than sequencing: it reads known positions rather than the whole genome, which makes it far cheaper but limits it to variants the array was designed to detect. Results are compiled into reports on variants associated with conditions including Parkinson's disease, coeliac disease and Alzheimer's disease. In 2008, when the company reported on more than 90 traits and conditions, Time named the product Invention of the Year.
Customers can download their uninterpreted raw genetic data and view results by chromosome, including mitochondrial DNA, comparing their variants against population frequencies. Ancestry customers have access to genealogical tools including a relative-matching database, and can view their mitochondrial haplogroup, indicating maternal lineage, and, if male or if a patrilineal relative has been tested, their Y chromosome haplogroup.
The service is commonly used by donor-conceived people to find biological siblings and in some cases their sperm or egg donor, an application the company did not design for and that has had significant social consequences for donor anonymity.
Products and pricing
In late 2009 the company briefly split its offering into Ancestry, Health and Complete editions, recombining them a year later. A monthly subscription for research-based updates introduced in late 2010 proved unpopular and was withdrawn in mid-2012. Between 22 November 2013 and 21 October 2015 only raw genetic data and ancestry results were sold in the United States because of FDA restrictions.
Pricing declined steeply as the company pursued database scale. The United States price fell from 999 dollars at launch in 2007 to 399 dollars in 2008 and 99 dollars in 2012, functioning explicitly as a loss leader to build the research asset. It rose to 199 dollars in October 2015. In September 2016 an ancestry-only version returned at 99 dollars with an optional 125 dollar health upgrade. The product launched in Canada in October 2014 at 99 Canadian dollars and in the United Kingdom in December 2014 at 125 pounds.
In October 2020 the company launched 23andMe+, a subscription at 29 dollars a year offering additional health and pharmacogenetic reports to customers genotyped on version 5 of its array, a belated attempt to create the recurring revenue the business lacked.
Ancestry and diversity programmes
In February 2018 the company improved ancestry reporting from regional to country-level estimates, adding 120 new regions. Acknowledging that genomic reference data for Asia and Africa was substantially poorer than for European populations, it launched the African Genetics Program in October 2016 with support from a National Institutes of Health grant, expanded this into the Global Genetics Program in February 2018 covering 61 underrepresented countries, and established the Populations Collaboration Program in April 2018 for formal research partnerships.
Regulation
The emergence of direct-to-consumer genetic testing raised questions about whether results could be meaningfully interpreted by consumers without clinical guidance, and whether they might lead to genetic discrimination. The regulatory framework was slow to develop.
In 2008 New York and California notified 23andMe and comparable companies that they required Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments licences to sell tests in those states. 23andMe obtained the necessary California licences by August 2008.
FDA warning and suspension
Wojcicki has said the company was in dialogue with the Food and Drug Administration from 2008. In 2010 the FDA notified several genetic testing companies, including 23andMe, that their tests were considered medical devices requiring federal approval, sending a similar letter to Illumina as manufacturer of the instruments. 23andMe first submitted applications for clearance in July and September 2012.
In November 2013 the FDA published guidance on its classification of genetic testing services and, after six months without communication from the company, ordered it to stop marketing its Personal Genome Service, stating that 23andMe had not demonstrated analytical or clinical validation and raising concerns about the public health consequences of inaccurate results. By early December the company had withdrawn advertising, and on 5 December it suspended health results for new customers while continuing to sell ancestry services and raw data.
23andMe publicly acknowledged that it had not met the FDA's expectations on communication and timelines. Wojcicki described the situation as new territory for both the company and the regulator. The episode is widely cited as a case of a Silicon Valley company misjudging a regulator that did not operate on the assumptions of the software industry.
Approvals
In 2014 the company submitted a 510(k) application for a carrier test for Bloom syndrome, providing data on analytical consistency, usability and clinical validity. The FDA cleared it in February 2015 and indicated it would not require similar applications for other carrier tests. Following further clarification on 1 October 2015, the company resumed marketing carrier tests in the United States on 21 October. Wojcicki acknowledged that part of the company had not understood how the regulatory environment worked, particularly the divided responsibilities of the FDA and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
In April 2017 the FDA approved ten genetic health risk tests submitted under the de novo pathway, covering late-onset Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, coeliac disease, hereditary thrombophilia, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency, glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, early-onset dystonia, factor XI deficiency and Gaucher's disease. The agency stated that it intended to exempt further risk tests from 510(k) requirements and emphasised that these were risk assessments rather than diagnostic tests.
In March 2018 the FDA approved a direct-to-consumer test for three BRCA mutations most common among people of Ashkenazi descent. The approval was accompanied by significant caveats: these are not the most common BRCA mutations in the general population, and the test covers only three of approximately 1,000 known mutations, so a negative result carries far less reassurance than consumers might assume.
Research
More than 80 per cent of 23andMe customers have opted in to research use of their data, producing a genotyped and phenotyped cohort of a scale unavailable to most academic studies. The research programme has generated hundreds of peer-reviewed publications. Data is studied by the company's own researchers and through collaborations with academic, government and pharmaceutical partners, and de-identified data has been licensed to pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. In July 2012 the company acquired CureTogether, a crowdsourced treatment ratings service holding data on more than 600 medical conditions.
In 2010 23andMe used its database to validate NIH-published work identifying mutations in the glucocerebrosidase gene as a risk factor for Parkinson's disease. In 2015 it began in-house drug discovery under the former Genentech executive Richard Scheller, with Parkinson's as a primary focus. It established agreements with Pfizer on the genetics of inflammatory bowel disease, and in 2016 used self-reported customer data to identify 17 genetic loci associated with depression, followed in 2017 by collaborations with Lundbeck and the Milken Institute on bipolar disorder and major depression.
In June 2020 the company published preliminary findings that people with type O blood might be at lower risk of COVID-19 infection. Among more than 750,000 participants, those with type O blood were 9 to 18 per cent less likely to contract the virus, and those exposed were 13 to 26 per cent less likely to test positive. The work was published in Nature Genetics in April 2021. Later research examined loss of taste and smell, vaccine reactions across ethnic groups and risk factors for long COVID.
In 2026 the 23andMe Research Institute published a genome-wide association study in Nature identifying variants associated with variation in weight loss and side effects among users of GLP-1 receptor agonist medications.
Controversies
Informed consent
Questions have been raised since at least 2013 about whether meaningful informed consent can be obtained through web-based interactions with people submitting samples. The company's practices have been approved by an institutional review board, but research on consumer behaviour suggests the approval rests on a fragile premise: Deloitte found that nine per cent of consumers read terms and conditions, and ProPrivacy put the figure at one per cent. Many customers may therefore have consented to research participation without understanding what they permitted. The privacy policy has been described as confusing.
Data collection and third-party sharing
The company collects not only genetic and personal information but also web behaviour data through its website, applications, cookies and software. The combination of provisions in its terms of service covering cookies, aggregate data disclosure and targeted advertising has been described as making 23andMe a valuable data source for third parties including health insurers, pharmaceutical companies, advertisers, biotechnology companies and law enforcement. Several sections of the privacy policy have permitted disclosure to third parties regardless of an individual's consent status, including collection of web behaviour data by advertising networks, inclusion of customer data in aggregate datasets shared with research partners, and sharing of personal information with affiliated companies.
Because 23andMe is not classified as a medical provider, it is not subject to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. The Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act protects against discrimination by employers and health insurers in most circumstances but does not extend to life insurance, long-term care insurance or disability insurance. The company became subject to the General Data Protection Regulation from 25 May 2018 in respect of European customers.
Law enforcement access
The company's transparency report stated as of September 2024 that it had received law enforcement requests for the data of 15 United States users since 2015, with none from other countries, and that no data had been produced in response. Its policy is not to share personal information voluntarily absent a valid court order, subpoena or search warrant. The concern raised by privacy advocates is less about current practice than about the durability of such a policy across changes of ownership, a concern the 2025 bankruptcy made concrete.
2023 data breach
In October 2023 the company disclosed a significant breach. Attackers accessed data on approximately 6.9 million users, roughly half the customer base, through a credential stuffing attack exploiting passwords reused from other compromised services. Stolen data included names, addresses and genetic information and was offered for sale online. The affected accounts had enabled the DNA Relatives feature, and the attackers specifically targeted users of Ashkenazi Jewish and Chinese descent, compiling and advertising lists organised by ethnicity.
In June 2025 the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office fined 23andMe 2.31 million pounds for failing to protect user data adequately, citing insufficient security measures including the absence of multi-factor authentication and a slow response to the breach. In May 2026 the California attorney general filed suit against the company for failure to safeguard sensitive personal information under the California Consumer Privacy Act and related statutes.
Bankruptcy and the fate of genetic data
The 2025 bankruptcy raised a question the industry had not previously confronted: what happens to the genetic data of 14 million people when the company holding it becomes insolvent. Attorneys general in several states issued alerts urging customers to delete their data, and the volume of deletion requests overwhelmed the company's systems. Privacy advocates argued that consent given to one corporate entity cannot meaningfully transfer to an unknown purchaser, and the episode prompted legislative proposals in several states to restrict the transfer of genetic data in insolvency proceedings.
See also
References