Theranos Founder Elizabeth Holmes was sentenced to more than 11 years in prison Friday after being convicted of fraud earlier this year for her actions as head of the defunct blood-testing company.
The sentence, delivered by Judge Edward Davila in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, ends the unceremonious fall from grace for the former Silicon Valley darling. Holmes, who gave birth to her first child last year and is pregnant with her second, had sought no more than 18 months in prison as her punishment and pleaded with the court for home confinement.
Prosecutors in the high-profile trial eyed a 15-year prison sentence.
Holmes’s exact sentence is 135 months. She was fined $400 and could be ordered to pay restitution at a later date.
Holmes was found guilty in January on three counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. She faced up to 20 years in prison for each of her four guilty counts.
Holmes was a 19-year-old Stanford dropout when she founded Theranos in 2003. At its peak, the company was valued at $9 billion. She raised hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and assembled a star-studded board of directors that wasn’t enough to keep the company afloat after a Wall Street Journal exposé by reporter John Carreyrou in 2015 uncovered the business’s fraud.
Carreyrou, speaking at Compliance Week’s National Conference in Washington, D.C. in May, praised the contributions of the whistleblowers who came forward regarding what was happening at Theranos as the real heroes that exposed Holmes’s crimes.
Holmes’s accomplice at Theranos, Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison (155 months) for his role in the company’s fraud as its chief operating officer.
Editor’s note: This story was updated to reflect the sentencing of Sunny Balwani.
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