The Theranos Effect may have tainted innovation investments (versus easy puzzle-piece fits), but complete blood count (CBC) via small blood samples is hardly a dead idea. It’s very much alive with the scientists who founded Sight Diagnostics, an Israeli startup with a fit-on-a-desktop lab, Olo, which can run multiple CBC counts. Blood can be taken from a traditional or finger-stick draw, with the usual caveats on capillary blood. The technology works via machine vision to take images of the blood sample to identify and count the different types of cells with AI to do the analysis. The goal is to be able to install a lab in a doctor’s office and run the test in 10 minutes, not five days.

Sight was founded by Daniel Levner, an artificial intelligence expert who was a scientist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (not a Stanford undergrad dropout), and Yossi Pollak, previously at Mobileye, an automotive computer vision developer that Intel bought for $15.3 billion last year–the largest Israeli tech exit ever. Oh, and they have an advisory board of Real Scientists.

Adding to Sight’s credibility is their CE Mark gained for Olo and completion of a 287-person clinical trial at Israel’s Shaare Zedek Medical Center, both announced this week. Webwire

The company is up to a Series B and has raised over $25 million since 2010 (Crunchbase)–a drop compared to Theranos, a subject where the founders are a little bit touchy, based on this Editor’s read of the Forbes article. While Olo is investigational in the US, their malaria test Parasight – which detects malaria using digital fluorescent microscopy and computer vision algorithms–has already sold over 600,000 units in 24 countries across Europe, Africa, and Asia–another major difference from Theranos. A significant investor is Eric Schmidt, formerly of Google, and head of Innovation Endeavors (SF Business Journal, slightly paywalled).

Video (01:56)

https://youtu.be/G1iSO1KaJ-Y