Fred Turner (Curative founder)

Fred Turner grew up in Brighouse, West Yorkshire, in the United Kingdom, and attended The Crossley Heath School in Halifax. In its article on his UK Young Engineer of the Year award, the Huddersfield Examiner gave his age as 17 and wrote that his mother, Louise (49), was an account manager, his father, David (50), was a self-employed businessman, and his brother, Gus, was 14; he said his parents used to take him to science museums when he was younger. ITV News wrote that inspiration from his parents first fuelled his interest in science and that he grew up carrying out experiments at home.⁠[1][2]

At the time he was studying five A-levels at The Crossley Heath School (biology, mathematics, further mathematics, physics and chemistry) and had earned five A grades at AS level; he also worked part-time selling sofas.⁠[1]

From May 2012 he built a polymerase chain reaction (PCR) machine in his bedroom to carry out basic DNA tests. He based the design on an American man’s model and improved it, used parts that included those from an old video player, and spent about £200, against about £3,000 for a new machine. He said he built it “to test once and for all why my brother is ginger and I’m not”; using a cheek swab from his brother, Gus, he found that Gus carries the gene mutation linked to red hair. Gus said it was “nice to know there’s a scientific reason as to why we look so different.” The paper added that researchers had contacted him wanting to use the machine.⁠[1]

On March 19, 2013 the machine won him the title UK Young Engineer of the Year at the Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Fair in London, where he showed his work alongside 450 other young people; the celebrity judge Ben Miller praised the project. He said: “This is amazing,” and “It’s brilliant to be recognised by such an impressive panel of judges,” and added: “I plan to go into industrial research when I graduate.” Andreessen HorowitzAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry’s 2017 investment announcement states that he was named “UK Young Engineer” in 2013 by The National Science + Engineering Competition for his early work developing novel technologies in genomics; dot.LA wrote in 2020 that he was named UK Young Engineer of the Year at 17 after building a DNA machine in his bedroom.⁠[1][2][3][4]

Writing about this episode in 2021, The Gazette said that as a teenager he built the machine to find out why he did not have red hair like his mother and brother, and that it earned him awards in England.⁠[5]

The Huddersfield Examiner wrote that he had a place at the University of OxfordUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry to study biochemistry from September. In its article on TL Biolabs’ seed round, GenomeWeb described him as “a University of Oxford biochemist.”⁠[1][6]

Accounts of where TL Biolabs began differ. GenomeWeb wrote that he co-founded TL Biolabs in Oxford, UK, in 2013. AgFunderNews wrote that the company’s origins date back to 2015, when, at 17, he won a UK award for his work in genetics; as part of the publicity he appeared on an early-morning breakfast show, where a farmer who found existing tests too expensive and too slow approached him, and he began running single-gene tests for that farmer and other UK farmers before working on a lower-cost way to do genomics. TL Biolabs’ own 2017 press release states that the company was “Founded in 2016.”⁠[6][7][8]

In summer 2016 TL Biolabs joined the Y Combinator accelerator program; AgFunderNews wrote that six team members shared a three-bedroom apartment for three months during the program. GenomeWeb wrote that the company had relocated to Santa Clara, CaliforniaCaliforniaCalifornia is a U.S. state on the Pacific coast; its capital is Sacramento and its largest city is Los Angeles. California was admitted to the Union on September 9, 1850, as the 31st state. Its population at the 2020 Census (April 1, 2020) was 39,538,223, the largest of any state.Open the full entry, where it incorporated “last summer.” BuzzFeed News wrote that he dropped out of a biochemistry program at the University of Oxford in 2016, moved to California and joined Y Combinator; The Gazette wrote that he left the University of Oxford for the San Francisco area.⁠[7][6][9][5]

Y Combinator’s company directory lists Shield Bio as a Summer 2016 company founded by Fred Turner (founder and CEO), located in San Francisco, with a team size of 28 and the status “Inactive.” The directory describes Shield Bio as a precision medicine company with a proprietary platform for reliable nanopore sequencing in under a minute in a clinical setting, focused on bringing third-generation (nanopore) sequencing into clinical use and applying it first to improving the treatment of infectious disease, including sepsis, which it says kills 300,000 people a year in the US alone.⁠[10]

On February 23, 2017 TL Biolabs announced a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Refactor Capital, the British tech entrepreneur Josh Buckley and Y Combinator taking part. The company was based in Santa Clara, California, with him as chief executive and Sam Parlett as chief operating officer; Andreessen Horowitz’s announcement also names Savvas Nicholas as chief information officer. AgFunderNews gave his title as CEO and CTO and wrote that the investment came from Andreessen Horowitz’s Bio Fund, run by partner Vijay Pande.⁠[8][6][3][7]

The company planned to use the money to expand its team of engineers, scientists and developers, finish research and development, and launch commercially that summer a $15 genomic test for dairy and beef cattle: farmers send in samples and receive information on their cows’ health, productivity and fertility, with software advising which calves to keep or sell and which bulls to breed to which cows. GenomeWeb wrote that the company produced its own 50,000-SNP microarrays for the test; AgFunderNews wrote that it made its own ear tags that collect a tissue sample when inserted, stored samples at its Santa Clara facility, and took orders through its herd management platform, TLBi, returning results in about one to two weeks.⁠[8][6][7]

In the release he described the aim as “making livestock breeding and management more efficient for farmers” and said the test would “empower farmers to make informed breeding and management decisions and positively impact their bottom line.” In Andreessen Horowitz’s announcement Vijay Pande wrote that existing genomic tests such as next-generation sequencing and SNP chips were too expensive for the cost-driven dairy business and that “a high quality $15 test makes it possible for farmers to test every animal”; he called the company’s people “a fantastic team,” writing that Sam Parlett and Savvas Nicholas bring operational expertise and experience leading fast-paced software development teams.⁠[8][6][3]

On June 16, 2017 the Thiel Foundation named the 25 members of the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows, and he was among them. The announcement states that the two-year Thiel FellowshipThiel FellowshipThe Thiel Fellowship is a two-year grant program started by investor Peter Thiel and run by the Thiel Foundation that funds young people who skip or stop out of college to build new things instead. The program has been criticized by figures in education for encouraging young people to leave college.Open the full entry provides $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology entrepreneurs, investors and scientists, encourages fellows to pursue full-time entrepreneurship instead of going to college, and that the fellows were selected from thousands of applications from around the world. The list gives him as from Halifax, UK / Santa Clara, California, with the project TL Biolabs in the field “Genomics,” and describes him: “Fred founded TL Biolabs, a company building a low-cost genotyping platform for farmers to understand an animal’s likely productivity and disease susceptibility at birth, allowing for increased profits and reduced environmental impact.”⁠[11][11]

The Gazette wrote in 2021 that TL Biolabs, a company offering genetic testing for cow herds, had received a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Foundation but “didn’t pan out.”⁠[5]

On November 14, 2017 ForbesForbesForbes is an American business media brand that began with Forbes magazine, founded by B.C. Forbes in 1917. It is known for rankings such as the Forbes 400, the World’s Billionaires list and 30 Under 30, and operates Forbes.com, ForbesLive events and licensed editions in 81 countries. Since 2014 a majority stake has been held by the Hong Kong investment group Integrated Whale Media; a 2021 plan to list on the New York Stock Exchange through a special purpose acquisition company was terminated in 2022. It is headquartered in Jersey City, New Jersey.Open the full entry published its 2018 “30 Under 30” list in Science, naming him together with his TL Biolabs co-founder Sam Parlett; it gave his age as 22 and Parlett’s as 26. The entry describes TL Biolabs as selling $15 genomic tests for beef and dairy cattle based on its own microarray technology, with cloud-based herd management software, and states that the co-founders had raised $4.71 million in venture financing, that beta testers were using the technology, and that a customer rollout was expected early the following year. Curative’s leadership page also notes that he was named to the Forbes “30 Under 30” list.⁠[12][13]

BuzzFeed News wrote that TL Biolabs aimed to sell genomic data about cows to farmers but that demand did not materialize, and that his next business, Shield Bio, a lab-testing company focused on infectious diseases, also did not succeed. The Los Angeles Business Journal wrote that he and his business partners Isaac Turner (no relation) and Vlad Slepnev had worked together in the Bay Area at Shield Bio, a clinical laboratory for infectious-disease testing that Fred Turner co-founded and headed and that “folded in January.” dot.LA wrote that Shield Bio sought to eliminate sepsis.⁠[9][14][4]

In January 2020 he co-founded Curative, initially to test for sepsis. The Los Angeles Business Journal wrote that he, Isaac Turner and Vlad Slepnev decided to develop a speedier way to detect sepsis; that Isaac Turner, who has a PhD in biomathematics, was Curative’s chief information officer in January 2021; that Slepnev, a molecular biologist, had started developing a prototype COVID-19 test; and that once they turned to COVID-19 testing they never went back to their work on sepsis. Curative’s 2022 press release states that the company was founded by its chief executive, Fred Turner, in 2020 in Los Angeles. Forbes senior contributor Bill Conerly wrote in 2025 that Curative initially tested for sepsis and that the COVID-19 pandemic hit in its first year.⁠[9][14][15][16]

On March 12, 2020 dot.LA wrote that Fred Turner, head of the Bay Area start-up Curative, had launched a facility to produce coronavirus test kits in a 10,000-square-foot lab in San Dimas, arriving in Los Angeles on Wednesday on a near-empty flight; he said the company normally worked on trying to prevent deaths due to sepsis. He said: “We thought the big testing labs would have it under control, but it became apparent to us that there wasn’t enough testing.” The team was scaling up a manual testing process often used in research and development labs, using saliva collected with a swab instead of nasal samples that require a nurse, with results within 24 hours.⁠[17]

He gave the targets as “We can now do 50 a day, by Monday 150, and the end of the week 1,000 a day,” with the company aiming to add 10,000 tests a day of capacity in about two weeks, and said: “The largest deficit right now is not screening health care workers. That’s just unacceptable.” Working with the Bay Area start-up 650Health and another company, Curative planned to distribute tests at drive-through clinics, at homes and through employers.⁠[17]

On March 13 dot.LA wrote that Llewellyn Cox, a general partner of the Los Angeles venture firm MarsBio and founder of LabLaunch, had put Curative in touch with KorvaLabs, and that Curative, which had already set up shop in San Dimas, was ramping up test-kit production thanks to the connection; MarsBio was also helping Curative raise $800,000 and expand its workforce. A May dot.LA article wrote that he moved to Southern California after a local venture capitalist connected him with a lab, and that he lived in hotels for weeks.⁠[18][4]

On April 16, 2020 Curative’s SARS-CoV-2 test received an Emergency Use Authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The Gazette wrote that Curative was one of about 200 firms granted FDA emergency use authorization for COVID-19 tests.⁠[14][9][5]

On May 4, 2020 dot.LA called him, then 25, “an Oxford dropout” who had just landed a deal with the U.S. Air Force to test military personnel worldwide, and wrote that Curative operated labs in San Dimas and Washington, D.C.; in a question in its interview, dot.LA stated that Curative was responsible for 95% of Los Angeles’s COVID-19 tests. He said the San Dimas lab had capacity for about 20,000 tests a day, with plans to scale to 30,000, that Curative was making about 50,000 kits a day, and that the goal was a million tests a week by about mid- to late May; he also described “gigalabs” that could process 50,000 to 100,000 tests a day, with TexasTexasTexas is a U.S. state in the south-central United States, with its capital at Austin and its largest city Houston. It was admitted to the Union on December 29, 1845, as the 28th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 29,145,505 residents.Open the full entry or ColoradoColoradoColorado is a U.S. state classified as one of the Mountain states, with Denver as its capital. It was admitted to the Union on August 1, 1876, as the 38th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 5,773,714.Open the full entry under consideration.⁠[4]

In the same article he described a protocol in which the person coughs before self-collecting a sample, said that “Self-collected sampling has got to be the way forward,” and put the test’s sensitivity at about 90%, against about 79% for nasopharyngeal swabs; the article wrote that Curative’s own non-peer-reviewed studies showed a false negative rate of about 10% (an earlier version had misstated it as a false positive rate and was corrected). He also said: “We are a strange company because our goal is to essentially put ourselves out of business.” Of himself he said: “I would like to get a little more sleep.”⁠[4]

The Los Angeles Business Journal wrote that a friend introduced him to KorvaLabs Inc. in San Dimas, and that by early May 2020 Curative had acquired Korva, taken over its lab and acquired additional warehouses nearby, creating a “quasi minicampus.”⁠[14]

On June 8, 2020 BloombergBloomberg L.P.Bloomberg L.P. is a global financial technology, data and media company founded by Michael Bloomberg in 1981. It began by providing terminal services that deliver data, analytics and news to financial professionals, and launched Bloomberg News in 1990. Michael Bloomberg has pledged the vast majority of the company’s profits to his philanthropic organization, Bloomberg Philanthropies.Open the full entry published the video “College-Dropout CEO Bets It All on New Covid Test,” whose description says that the biotech start-up Curative pivoted its entire business toward COVID-19 early in the pandemic, became a testing powerhouse in California almost overnight and was working across the United StatesUnited StatesThe United States is a federal country in North America made up of 50 states, the District of Columbia as the seat of government, and territories such as Puerto Rico and Guam; its capital is Washington, D.C. The Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776. The 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted a resident population of 331,449,281, and the 435 seats of the House of Representatives are apportioned among the states on the basis of the census.Open the full entry, and that its 25-year-old chief executive, Fred Turner, explains how he went from college dropout to that point.⁠[19]

On January 3, 2021 the Los Angeles Business Journal described him, then 25, as Curative’s co-founder and chief executive. The company was processing about 150,000 saliva samples a day, about 35,000 of them from Los Angeles, employed 2,600 people at three labs in San Dimas, Texas and Washington, D.C., counted the U.S. Air Force and the states of FloridaFloridaFlorida is a U.S. state occupying mainly the Florida peninsula, with its capital at Tallahassee; its most populous city is Jacksonville. It entered the Union on March 3, 1845, as the 27th state, and had a population of 21,538,187 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and Texas among its clients, and held a $13 million research and development agreement with the Air Force to produce more than 40,000 test kits. With CORE, the aid organization founded by the actor Sean Penn, it ran free testing at 10 city-run sites in Los Angeles; the city paid up to $115 for each test not covered by insurance, and the city controller’s records showed that Curative had collected $64.7 million from the city. The company had raised $8 million from DCVCDCVCDCVC (Data Collective) is an American deep tech venture capital firm founded in 2010 by Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue, with offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco, California. It invests in companies that use computing and AI to solve real-world problems in fields such as energy, climate, biomedicine, defense, space, and industry; as of October 2026 it had more than $4 billion in assets under management across 13 funds.Open the full entry, Refactor Capital and TED curator Chris Anderson and would not share financial information.⁠[14]

Under a city–county partnership of December 29, 2020, Curative was to deliver 69,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine to 339 nursing homes before January 1; it had earlier given more than 10,000 flu vaccine doses with CORE and the University of Southern CaliforniaUniversity of Southern CaliforniaThe University of Southern California (USC) is a private research university in Los Angeles, California, planned by a group led by Judge Robert Maclay Widney and opened to students in 1880.Open the full entry. He said: “The scale is just crazy at this point,” and “The goal is to end the pandemic as quickly as possible.” Recalling that Bay Area labs had at first refused to run the test once they learned it was for COVID-19, because before the testing protocols were known the virus was much scarier for people, he said: “No one wanted us in their lab”; the city of Los Angeles, he said, gave them an anchor customer — “We had that anchor customer buying a lot of tests” — which let Curative open its own labs and hire more staff. His goal was to turn the city’s drive-through testing locations into drive-through vaccination sites.⁠[14]

On January 4, 2021 the FDA issued a safety communication about the risk of false results, particularly false negative results, with Curative’s SARS-CoV-2 test. On January 6 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Laboratory Outreach Communication System relayed the alert to clinical laboratory professionals, advising that the test be performed following its instructions for use to reduce the risk of false negatives and encouraging reports of adverse events or suspected problems with test performance through the FDA’s MedWatch program. KTRK-TV’s story carried by ABC7 Los Angeles set out the FDA’s statements: the risks to a patient of a false negative include delayed or lack of supportive treatment, along with lack of monitoring of infected people and their close contacts and increased community spread; many false negatives occur where tests are not administered as directed or are administered without supervision; and when the test is not performed in accordance with its authorization or authorized labeling, “there is a greater risk that the results of the test may not be accurate.”⁠[20][21]

BuzzFeed News wrote that the communication restated the terms of the emergency use authorization — nasal and saliva tests limited to people with symptoms, self-collection under the supervision of a healthcare worker, and negative saliva results to be confirmed with a different sample type — without saying what prompted it, and that an FDA spokesperson said the agency was “reviewing all available information about this test, including information that has become available post-authorization.” FDA documents showed that among 52 symptomatic, supervised people the saliva test correctly detected all positive and negative cases; among 20 symptomatic, unsupervised people it detected 75% of positive cases; and among asymptomatic, unsupervised people it correctly identified 82% of 17 negative cases and none of 3 positive cases.⁠[9]

In a statement Curative said that the FDA’s January 4 safety communication concerned the potential for false negatives, “consistent with our FDA authorized labeling,” that the test had been validated and was being offered during the pandemic under an Emergency Use Authorization, and that “The test performance and labeling, however, have not changed.” The company said it had recently submitted data from a clinical study of more than 1,300 subjects to the FDA, that because of FDA questions about the study design for these additional data the FDA’s reminder of existing precautions remained in place, and that it would continue to work actively with the FDA. BuzzFeed News wrote that he said he remained “confident” in the tests’ accuracy and that “Testing sensitivity and accuracy on behalf of our patients is at the heart of our work”; that Curative’s acting medical director, Jeffrey Klausner, said the notice “has nothing to do with the current test” and that the test had been “performing extremely well”; and that the company spokesperson Miranda Gottlieb said by email that Curative’s tests were 100% accurate at detecting positive and negative cases. On January 8 he tweeted a graph comparing Curative’s positivity rate with California’s overall rate, and a Curative spokesperson said it showed that “Curative’s positivity rate largely agrees with other labs”; outside experts called the graph misleading because the people Curative tested were not necessarily representative of all Californians getting tested. Geoffrey Baird, a pathologist at the University of Washington School of Medicine, said: “Without telling you who these people are, I think this plot is entirely meaningless in and of itself,” and said of the asymptomatic, unsupervised results: “That’s bad.” Susan Butler-Wu, an associate professor of clinical pathology at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine, said: “I can’t judge how serious a problem this is because they’re not giving any specifics,” and said Curative filled a need that public lab testing had not met.⁠[21][9]

BuzzFeed News wrote that Curative then claimed to have processed more than 13 million tests, or 10% of all tests nationwide, and that its three labs, in San Dimas, Washington, D.C., and outside Austin, Texas, were processing about 1 million tests a week from more than 10,000 testing sites, with more than 4,000 employees. After the alert, Los Angeles County broke ties with the company, San Francisco’s school district and Sonoma County walked away from pilot programs, and San Mateo County reserved the spit tests for people with symptoms, while the city of Los Angeles, Seattle and Houston still directed people, including those without symptoms, to Curative. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti said: “Ninety-two thousand people — a full third of all the positives we have gotten — have been from asymptomatic people.” The U.S. Air Force, which had a $42 million deal with the company, said it was “carefully considering” the notice. In KTRK-TV’s story carried by ABC7 Los Angeles, the Houston Health Department said the FDA advisory “does not recommend the discontinuation of the tests,” that “All tests are susceptible to false results,” urging people not to rely on a single negative test, and that “Curative tests are not used at any health department operated testing sites”; the story added that the department helped Curative identify vulnerable areas and promoted Curative’s sites on its website, and put Curative’s nationwide total at more than 11 million tests.⁠[9][21]

On May 8, 2021 The Gazette in Colorado Springs published an article by Christopher Osher on Colorado’s partnership with Curative. It wrote that Curative (which it called Curative Labs, based in San Dimas) won a contract on September 4 to become the frontline testing provider for Colorado’s long-term care facilities, including nursing homes; it supplied more than 715,000 tests under the contract, about 70,000 a week on average, and the state paid more than $89.2 million. The paper wrote that Gary Lauder, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and grandson of the founder of Estée Lauder, had introduced him to Kacey Wulff, then Governor Jared Polis’s senior adviser for COVID-19 response, resilience and recovery, who forwarded Curative’s promotional material to the state’s testing team, led by Sarah Tuneberg. Tuneberg, who headed the state’s containment and testing strategy until late January, said she did not recall receiving Curative emails from Wulff and that a Pitkin County public health official or county staffer, after a positive experience at a Curative kiosk in Los Angeles, first drew her interest; on the chief executive’s age she said she had “vetted deeply” the company and that “To say you shouldn’t be picking an entrepreneurial company with a young founder is ageist,” adding that she cared more about whether the company could deliver.⁠[5]

The article wrote that the FDA’s emergency use authorization covered only people with symptoms within 14 days, while Colorado was using the test for mass testing in nursing homes. In a December 22 email the FDA scientific reviewer Joseph Briggs wrote that the device “may put patients at unreasonable risk of harm due to inaccurate results,” and an FDA official’s reanalysis of the data found that Curative’s positive results matched a more accurate comparison test 72.3% of the time for oral swabs and 79.3% for nasal swabs; Curative had tried “last year” to persuade the FDA to extend the authorization to people without symptoms, and the FDA official who reviewed the data was not persuaded — both points the paper took from the Florida Bulldog. After Colorado asked for clarification, the FDA further emphasized that Curative’s tests should not be used on asymptomatic people. On January 21 state officials ordered nursing homes to stop using Curative’s tests, and they later let the state’s contract with Curative expire at the end of March without renewing it; state health officials said a conversation with FDA officials in late January, in which the FDA said asymptomatic testing was outside the authorization, clinched the decision. Tuneberg said: “Our decision was really based on concerns from the FDA.”⁠[5]

The paper recorded complaints from care operators: Gregory Gahm, medical director of Vivage, which runs nearly 30 Colorado nursing homes, wrote in a January email: “Unfortunately, Curative sold us a bill of goods”; Joyce Humiston, an administrator for a chain of nursing homes in southwest Colorado, warned county officials in a November 27 email of a “troubling trend” of staff testing negative elsewhere but positive with Curative; and Yvonne Myers of Columbine Health Systems said that false positives from Curative led one facility to relocate 30 residents and that follow-up testing at the Colorado State University lab found that 16 staff members flagged by Curative did not have the virus. State officials said they could not know for sure whether the Curative tests were at fault, because the tests were not run at the same time. Rachel Herlihy, the state’s top epidemiologist, said at a March press conference: “We didn’t see impact or harm from Curative during that period of time,” and state health officials, including Tuneberg, said they had compared nursing homes that used Curative testing against those that used other tests and found no significant statistical difference in death rates or cases.⁠[5]

The Curative spokesperson Gianni Pasquale said the company was “disappointed” with the decision of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment but remained “confident in our data, our test and in the service we continue to provide,” and said: “Curative’s test performance and labeling have not changed, nor has the company observed any changes in test performance.” The article wrote that the chief executive, Fred Turner, did not return messages seeking comment. Gothams, Curative’s California-based billing and logistics partner, invoiced a further $799,700 for more than 7,000 tests processed in February and March, and a state official said “we are negotiating the final invoice” and that the process “could take some time.”⁠[5]

STAT wrote that the FDA and states said Curative’s tests produced “too many false negatives,” meaning patients who had the virus may have received negative results, and that the FDA “revoked Curative’s emergency use authorization for the tests in July 2021, at the company’s request.” STAT also referred to a BuzzFeed News story in which scientists argued that “the FDA was holding Curative to an unreasonably high standard.”⁠[22]

In December 2021 Curative acquired MediView, an Austin-established full-spectrum third-party administrator handling claims processing, medical management services and complex reporting, from Covenant Management Systems, in anticipation of launching its new employer-based, fully licensed PPO health insurance. On December 21, 2022 Curative announced that MediView would be rebranded as Curative Administrators to provide in-house services for its health plan, including claims processing, utilization review and case and disease management, while continuing to serve MediView’s existing clients. Speaking as chief executive and co-founder, he said in the announcement that Curative Administrators “keeps everything in-house for our members,” providing extra security and speed in retrieving data records.⁠[23]

STAT wrote that he began considering what came next because “Covid testing isn’t going to be a need forever,” and that, noticing he was spending more time on billing and dealing with health insurers than on testing, he asked: “so why not be a health insurer?” Curative’s blog states that the company received its Texas insurance license in summer 2022 and that, per documents filed with Texas insurance regulators, it committed $27 million of its own cash to cover its first three years of operations.⁠[22][24]

On September 21, 2022 Curative announced an employer health plan approved by the Texas Department of Insurance, launched first in the Austin area (Travis and Williamson counties) for employers with 51 or more employees: members pay one monthly premium and have $0 copays, $0 deductibles and $0 out-of-pocket costs for in-network care, the only condition being a preventive “Baseline Visit” within 120 days of enrollment, and each member is assigned a health navigator. The network included Austin Regional Clinic, Austin Diagnostic Clinic and all St. David’s facilities, with 24/7/365 telemedicine access to a local physician in under 10 minutes, and Curative Commons in downtown Austin was to open in 2023.⁠[15]

Speaking as co-founder and chief executive, he said in the release: “We’re on a mission to drastically remake the United States’ healthcare system,” and “The only way to achieve true cost transparency is for all in-network services to be covered at $0 cost.” The release states that Curative provided more than 35 million tests across thousands of testing sites in more than 40 states, that it and its managed medical entities provided two million vaccines, and that the new health plan “is the primary focus of the company.” Related posts on the page record that Curative announced on August 1, 2023 the expansion of the plan to the Dallas metro area and on August 16, 2023 the approval of its Certificate of Authority in Florida.⁠[15]

On November 21, 2022 Curative’s blog relayed an Austin Business Journal feature on him, with a subtitle calling him Curative’s “27-year-old CEO”; he said: “We’re building a new national health insurance company,” aiming for “A new United or Cigna or Aetna health plan that’s actually focused on preventative care,” and described the plan as “NetflixNetflixNetflix is a U.S. entertainment company that offers streaming series, films, games, and live programming, headquartered in Los Gatos, California. Founded in 1997, it grew from online DVD rental into an international subscription entertainment service and also runs original content, advertising, and in-person experience businesses.Open the full entry for health care.”⁠[25]

STAT published an article on Curative’s pivot on December 12, 2022; Curative’s blog wrote that in the article he said roughly 10 Texas employers would use Curative as their health insurer the following year and that workers were drawn by paying nothing for in-network care once they completed an hour-long annual health assessment; to the idea that free access leads to overuse he replied: “People have better things to do.” He described the approach as: “Invest in people in the first year, expand access to care, make it easy to go and get preventive care, and make a plan that is actually easy to understand.”⁠[24][22]

He presented Curative’s new plan at the 2023 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Curative’s blog wrote that he described the model as subscription-based: members pay a monthly premium and receive unlimited in-network care if they complete one preventive Baseline Visit a year, and otherwise a $5,000 deductible applies; he said: “Our health care model operates similarly to the subscription-based system of popular streaming services like Netflix.” The blog states that during the pandemic Curative ran more than 36 million tests and gave 2.5 million COVID-19 vaccine doses across 48 states, including the Dodger Stadium testing site, which processed about 10,000 samples a day, and that the plan was then available only to Austin employers with 51 or more employees.⁠[26]

On February 6, 2023 Becker’s Payer Issues wrote that as the pandemic eased Curative moved into health insurance, relocated its headquarters from California to Texas and laid off staff; the plan had a few thousand members in Austin, about 50% of whom had completed or scheduled the baseline visit since January 1 against a goal of 90%, and the company planned to expand to San Antonio in the following months and to all of Texas by the end of the year. He said Curative’s premiums were similar to those of other carriers’ plans with a $3,000 deductible, that the company invested in primary care up front expecting savings in years two and three from fewer emergency room visits, hospitalizations and specialty drugs, and that it targeted the large-group market rather than the Affordable Care Act exchange, which he believed was not profitable; he said: “We view dollars spent on primary care as a good thing, rather than a place to save money.” His aim was to build Curative into a large national carrier offering employers a PPO commercial product that prioritizes long-term outcomes.⁠[27]

On March 25, 2025 Forbes senior contributor Bill Conerly wrote about how he handles surges in demand: when demand for COVID-19 testing surged, swabbing capacity exceeded lab capacity, and swabbing everyone would have created a lab backlog that delayed results by days and made them much less useful, so Curative slowed swabbing to match the lab’s throughput; he cited Eliyahu Goldratt’s The Goal, and the company focused on the process steps that limited throughput. When swabs were scarce he advocated “orthogonal supply chains,” avoiding competition for the materials everyone else was buying, and his team found an alternative product and got it certified; he said the lab’s viral load results are rarely useful for an individual, but the average viral load at a testing location can predict future test demand. The article states that after Curative moved into group health insurance with no deductible and no copays, its bottlenecks became onboarding staff and finding healthcare providers for members; each member joins a video call explaining the plan, the company manages its pace of growth through pricing, aiming for profitable growth without overwhelming its service, and it avoids customized plans, which make authorizations harder and cause more errors.⁠[16]

On December 2, 2025 Curative announced a Series B of more than $150 million at a valuation of $1.275 billion, led by the Upside Vision Fund of TED chairman Chris Anderson; Justin Mateen, founder of JAM Fund, invested $47.5 million personally and through JAM Fund, and the release calls him Curative’s first investor, whose initial investment had grown more than 400-fold; other investors included Mike NovogratzMike NovogratzMike Novogratz (Michael Novogratz) is an American investor and the founder and chief executive officer of Galaxy Digital, a digital asset and data center company. A former U.S. Army helicopter pilot, he spent 11 years at Goldman Sachs, becoming a partner in 1998, and later served as a partner and president of Fortress Investment Group, leaving after the macro hedge fund he managed closed in 2015 and turning to crypto assets.Open the full entry of Galaxy DigitalGalaxy DigitalGalaxy Digital (Galaxy Digital Inc., Nasdaq and Toronto Stock Exchange: GLXY) is a New York-based digital asset financial services and data center infrastructure company founded by Mike Novogratz, which says it was founded in 2018. It provides institutional clients with digital asset trading, lending, investment banking, asset management, staking, and custody technology services, and is building data centers in Texas for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing.Open the full entry, Stanley DruckenmillerStanley DruckenmillerStanley Druckenmiller is an American investor and philanthropist. He founded the hedge fund Duquesne Capital Management in 1981 and ran it until 2010, managed George Soros’s Quantum Fund from 1988 to 2000, and now leads the Duquesne Family Office, which manages his own capital.Open the full entry’s Duquesne Family Office, DCVC and Martin Varsavsky. The release states that the health insurance business, launched less than three years earlier, served more than 1,200 employer clients and more than 165,000 members, was profitable, operated in Texas, Florida and Georgia with the Mid-Atlantic states next, and that its plan was rated A- by AM Best. Speaking as co-founder and chief executive, he said: “Curative’s mission is to eliminate financial barriers and guide our members at every step of their health journey.”⁠[28]

Bloomberg Government wrote the same day that Curative, an Austin-based health insurance start-up, had raised more than $150 million in a round that the company said valued it at about $1.28 billion.⁠[29]

On March 20, 2026 Healthcare Brew published an interview in which he explained why his alternative health plan was valued at $1.3 billion. He said: “The trend I see finally gaining steam…is the realization that deferred care is the real cost driver, not the care itself.” He said the $0 structure often draws doubts about network size, premiums or surgery approvals, and said: “It’s not too good to be true; it’s just logically sound,” and: “The catch—if you want to call it that—is the baseline visit.” The article states that members must complete a baseline preventive visit within their first 120 days to keep the $0 benefit for the full plan year.⁠[30]

On July 18, 2026 the 20VC podcast published an interview with him. The episode description calls him the founder and chief executive of Curative, “one of the wildest stories in tech,” and says he scaled a COVID testing business from $0 to $5 billion in revenue, took the team from 7 to 7,000 employees in just nine months, that it conducted more than 206,000 COVID tests in a single day and signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars with several of the largest U.S. states, and that Curative is now a unicorn health insurance business taking on the incumbents in one of health care’s largest markets. The agenda lists topics including how a spare-time COVID test became a $5 billion business, the move from testing cows to STDs, sepsis and COVID, the pivot into health insurance, how AI is rebuilding Curative, why Curative is cutting 80% of its software spend, why nuclear and whether Subcritical could become bigger than Curative, and what marriage and fatherhood have taught him.⁠[31]

As of November 2026, Curative’s leadership page lists him as CEO and co-founder, stating that he led the company’s shift from COVID-19 testing provider to health insurer, that its model has reached a 98% member engagement rate, and that he previously founded several venture-backed biotech start-ups. The page names the other two co-founders as Isaac Turner, chief technology officer, and Tami Wilson-Ciranna, president.⁠[13]

Curative: Official website: https://curative.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[13]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[32]

X: Public account: https://x.com/FredTurnerBio (opens in a new window).⁠[10]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/fred-turner-70688776/ (opens in a new window).⁠[10]