Sunny Balwani

Ramesh "Sunny" Balwani (born June 13, 1965) is a businessman, former president and chief operating officer of Theranos, which was a privately held health technology company founded by his then-girlfriend Elizabeth Holmes.

He and Holmes fraudulently represented that they had devised a revolutionary blood test that required only small amounts of blood, such as from a fingerstick. Both Balwani and Holmes were convicted of fraud.

The consequences of the fraud led to the collapse of Theranos and the loss of billions of dollars to investors.

He attended Aitchison College, a prestigious boarding school in Lahore, until 1984.

Balwani speaks Sindhi, Urdu, Hindi and English.

His family eventually moved to India "because being a Hindu in a mostly all-Muslim country of Pakistan was very difficult" according to Balwani's personal lawyer.

Later they immigrated to the United States.

In the Spring 1987 semester, Balwani began undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Austin as an international student where he was a member of the Pakistani Students Association.

"He was very patriotically Pakistani," said one friend of Balwani's at the time, "He was one of us."

In official documents from the late 1990s and on divorce papers from 2002, he was known as Ramesh, his given name.

In the 1990s, Balwani worked for Lotus Software and Microsoft.

During Balwani's tenure at Microsoft he worked in sales.

He claims to have written thousands of lines of code.

However, independent investigations could not verify this, and numerous Microsoft managers who were asked about him could not remember him.

While at Microsoft, he met a Japanese artist, Keiko Fujimoto, who became his wife.

Balwani left the campus sometime after 1991 to begin working; he would eventually complete a degree, but not until 1997 with a bachelor's in information systems.

Despite research into the question by The New York Times, it is unknown when, or why, he took the nickname "Sunny".

In late 1999 he joined CommerceBid.com as President.

It was a software development company that helped businesses buy and sell items via auctions over the burgeoning Internet.

In 1999, the company was purchased by Commerce One, another business development software company with a high valuation.

The buyout was done entirely with stock, and Balwani joined the board of the new company.

In July 2000, Balwani sold his shares in Commerce One, netting nearly $40 million shortly before the company went out of business, just before the dot com bubble burst.

He later went back to school and received a Master of Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley in 2003.

He spent another four years in a computer science graduate program at Stanford University, but dropped out in 2008.

While enrolled at Berkeley, Balwani, who was 37 at the time, met Elizabeth Holmes, who was 18 and in her senior year of high school.

Holmes pursued an undergraduate degree in chemical engineering at Stanford, but later dropped out to focus full-time on Theranos.

Balwani joined Theranos in 2009.

He ran the company's day-to-day operations as its president.

He had no training in biological sciences or medical devices, which became an issue due to the absence of medical experts on the company's board of directors and Balwani's behavior.

He was described by former Theranos employees as overbearing, uncompromising and so concerned about industrial espionage that he verged on paranoia.

Within Theranos, Balwani was known for using technical terms he seemingly did not understand in what others believed were attempts to appear more knowledgeable.

By 2012, he was signing papers at Theranos as Sunny Balwani.

Starting in 2015, Theranos came under criticism in the media due to its questionable claims and practices.

The company was eventually liquidated.

Balwani and Holmes were criminally charged by federal authorities for operating the business as a multi-million-dollar scheme to defraud investors and patients.

Holmes was found guilty and sentenced to 11 years and 3 months in prison.

Balwani was found guilty on all counts.

He was sentenced to 12 years and 11 months, plus three years of probation and surrendered on April 20, 2023.

Holmes and Balwani were further ordered to pay $452 million to the victims of the fraud, with responsibility for the payment shared between them.

Ramesh Balwani was born in Sindh, Pakistan, into an upper middle-class Sindhi Hindu farming family.