20VC: $5BN in Revenue, 7 to 7,000 Employees in 9 Months, 206,000 Tests in a Single Day: The Craziest Story in Startups: Curative with Fred Turner

**Fred Turner** (0:00)
So our Chief Scientific Officer at Curative had, in his spare time, developed a COVID test. Lockdown had just started. Everybody was starting to freak out. There was basically nowhere to get a test.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:10)
What's the single largest contract you signed?

**Fred Turner** (0:12)
In the hundreds of millions of dollars. I think our peak day was 206,000 people tested in a single day. And the company went from about 7,000 to 7,000 employees in those first nine months. The total revenue ended up being about 5 billion over a three-year period. We did 2.5 million vaccinations. That was another service we did. We also lost a ton of money on that. That was a terrible business. We're cutting about 80% of our SaaS spend this year. One of our internal meetings, we have a slide of like when are SaaS contracts due and whose job is it to tell them that we're not renewing this year.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:43)
How big do you think Anthropic will be?

**Fred Turner** (0:45)
I think it could be 10 trillion.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:46)
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited for a freaking wild story today. Fred Turner, co-founder and CEO of Curative. Now, this is an English founder in the Valley who scaled a COVID testing business to $5 billion in revenue. Then, he had to scale it all back. It did not last post-COVID for obvious reasons. Today, he turned it into a health insurance provider that's worth $1.3 billion. And in the show, he says some pretty wild stuff, like he's gonna cancel his $600,000 Salesforce subscription. Sorry, Mark and Salesforce don't kill me. For a vibe-coded solution, they built in a matter of months. It's a wild story, and there are some mind-blowing elements to this journey. But before we dive into the show today, we used AlphaSense on an investment that helped us close an $8 million deal. $8 million, baby. That's a lot of money. That's why I'm genuinely excited to have them as a partner on 20VC. AlphaSense combines AI with one of the world's deepest libraries of market intelligence, including expert interviews, broker research, earnings calls, company filings and real-time news. Every answer is grounded in this incredibly trusted evidence and fully traceable to the original source, which is so important. So you can make really high conviction decisions with confidence. But the best part, they're building super analyst and always on AI analyst. So instead of starting your day with another search, you'll start with work you already done, your coverage monitored, the important developments surfaced and your investment brief already waiting for you. See for yourself, head to alphasense.com/20vc.
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