Gotta give Elizabeth Holmes a bit of credit She sure doesn't lack for chutzpah.

Elizabeth Holmes, the cool-as-a-cucumber, Steve Jobs dress-alike, It Girl genius, and fraudster par excellence who conned a lot of supposedly smart folks into investing in Theranos, her blood testing company, is serving a pretty hefty sentence for her fraudly ways. She's gotten some time off for good behavior, but she's still looking at another 7.5 years for her criming, which largely revolved around faking test results, and using equipment not her own, to falsely support Theranos' positioning as a groundbreaking innovator when it came to blood testing. 

So she's not out of prison for a while. And it doesn't look like she's quite out of the blood testing game, either.

That, or Billy Evans, her partner and the father of her two kids, has independently and coincidentally come up with an earth-shattering new approach to doing diagnostic health testing. And he's looking for investors.

Mr. Evans’s company is named Haemanthus, which is a flower also known as the blood lily. It plans to begin with testing pets for diseases before progressing to humans, according to two investors pitched on the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they had agreed to keep the plans secret. Mr. Evans’s marketing materials, which lay out hopes to eventually raise more than $50 million, say the ultimate goal is nothing short of “human health optimization.”

A photo provided to potential investors of the start-up’s prototype bears more than a passing physical resemblance to Theranos’s infamous blood-testing machine, variously known as the Edison or miniLab. The device that Mr. Evans’s company is developing is a rectangular contraption with a door, a digital display screen and what the investor materials describe as tunable lasers inside.(Source: NY Times)

Hmmm. Walks like a duck. Quacks like a duck...

Not that Evans couldn't have decided to get into the diagnostic testing biz all on his lonesome. After all, he's not a science guy, but he does have a degree from MIT (in Econ, the dismal science). He's worked at LinkedIn, and at Luminar, a self-driving car company, so there's that. 

Still....

So far, it looks like a lot of investors are taking a pass. VC James Breyer - a smart enough money guy to have gotten into Facebook early on - isn't opening his pocketbook:

...“for many of the same reasons we passed twice on Theranos.”

“In diagnostics, we’ve long held that the difference between a compelling story and a great company lies in scientific defensibility and clinical utility,” he wrote in an email.

Michael Dell's investment group also decided against.

But Haemanthus is scoring a few investment wins:

The one investor who could be identified in public records is Matthew E. Parkhurst, the part owner of a Mediterranean tapas bar in downtown Austin and other investments. 

Could a tapas bar owner have better investing instincts than Michael Dell? Inquiring minds...

Rather than focus initially on human testing, Haemanthus is going after the pet diagnostic market, possibly because there's less regulation. 

Haemanthus' marketing materials make no mention of Elizabeth Holmes. (Surprise, surprise.) But the idea of her having no involvement here strains credulity, that's for sure.

And however compelling the core idea may be, however valuable it would be to have better and more efficient means to test for disease, who in their right mind is going to invest in a company that's got someone doing time for defrauding investors hovering in the wings?

Gotten give Elizabeth Holmes a bit of credit. She sure doesn't lack for chutzpah.