Guardant Health

Guardant Health is a precision oncology company that sells blood tests which read tumor DNA circulating in a patient's bloodstream, an approach known as liquid biopsy. It was founded in 2012 by Helmy Eltoukhy and AmirAli Talasaz, who went on to serve as co-CEOs, and was incorporated in Delaware in 2011. Its first product, Guardant360, launched in 2014 for patients with advanced cancer; by its 2018 IPO prospectus the test had been used by more than 5,000 oncologists and over 40 biopharmaceutical companies. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

The company raised roughly $550 million privately in its first six years. In 2014 it raised $30 million, including $10 million from Sequoia Capital, and in 2015 it raised $50 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. From December 2015 to March 2016 it sold Series D preferred stock for $82.8 million. The largest round came in 2017: between May and July of that year Guardant sold Series E preferred stock for $320.4 million in a financing led by SoftBank, with an agreement that topped SoftBank's fully diluted stake up to 35%. The Series E also paid for a repurchase of founder shares, a tender offer for employees, and a joint venture with SoftBank, Guardant Health AMEA, to sell the tests in Asia, the Middle East and Africa. Khosla Ventures was also a pre-IPO holder, and investor Aydin Senkut was an early backer.

Guardant priced its IPO on October 3, 2018, selling 12.5 million shares at $19.00 for gross proceeds of $237.5 million, and listed on the Nasdaq Global Select Market as GH. The offering valued the company at about $3.3 billion. The prospectus showed revenue of $49.8 million in 2017, up from $25.2 million in 2016, with a 2017 net loss of $83.2 million, and 25,626 clinical tests sold in 2017. Revenue reached $374 million in 2021 and $982 million in 2025, while the company reported a 2025 net loss of $416 million as it kept spending on cancer screening and recurrence testing.

Guardant reached the public market about six years after its founding, a short path for a diagnostics company. Early venture firms such as Sequoia Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners came in during the company's first years, while SoftBank's Vision Fund entered just over a year before the IPO with a growth check large enough to set a 35% ownership target. The structure, which bundled new primary capital with secondary liquidity for the founders and employees and a regional joint venture, shows how late-stage investors in 2017 used size to secure large stakes in companies already close to an IPO.