Your whole description of raising money, gauging customer interest, etc. is not really applicable here. Interest did not need to be gauged, they were claiming to have a technology that was fundamentally better than the existing tech. This is not a case of &quot;do people want to use my new todo app?&quot;.<p>The use of competitor equipment in this case was a tacit admission of their failure to deliver. The business proposition was &quot;we have blood tests that are superior in every way&quot;, not &quot;we want to open blood testing centers in Walmart&quot;.<p>How much VC funding do you think they would have gotten on a pitch of opening retail blood testing centers with conventional equipment? It sounds like a boring, low margin business that no VC would want a part of.