Digital health · Genetic counseling at scale
Clear Genetics
Three founders, one of them the CEO’s father, built a chatbot that walked patients through genetic testing. Invitae bought it for $50.1 million in 2019. Four years later the buyer was in Chapter 11. The chatbot is still on the market.
The bot that tells you it is a bot
In September 2018, Geisinger Health began sending a chatbot to patients in MyCode, its population sequencing program in rural Pennsylvania. It checked in a month after a result landed. Had you booked the appointment? Had you told your relatives?
The first thing it did was admit what it was. Amy Curry Sturm, who co-directed MyCode screening and counseling, told GenomeWeb the choice was deliberate. “We didn’t feel comfortable giving people the impression that they’re interacting with a human when in fact they’re not,” she said. Geisinger was handing people information about BRCA1 mutations and Lynch syndrome, and nobody wanted that delivered by something pretending to be a person. The company behind the bot was Clear Genetics, a San Francisco startup with eight US employees. Its chief executive agreed. “Gia’s role isn’t to replace but to assist genetic counselors,” Moran Snir said. “So, we [at Clear Genetics] also didn’t feel right that she poses as a human.”
One counselor for every 80,000 people
When CNBC wrote about Clear Genetics in August 2017, there were roughly 4,000 genetic counselors in the country, one for every 80,000 Americans, and some patients waited months. Testing volume was climbing far faster than the profession could grow. Snir’s argument was that most of a first appointment is repeatable.
Counselors were watchful rather than hostile. Laura Hercher of Sarah Lawrence College called the idea innovative and predicted a division of labor: “I think we’re moving to where genetic counselors handle complicated situations like positive results.” Andrea Forman of Fox Chase Cancer Center named the limit. “I don’t think [a chatbot] is going to replace the genetic counselor completely,” she said.
A family company
Clear Genetics was founded in 2016 by Moran Shochat Snir, Guy Snir and Prof. Mordechai Shohat, MD. Globes set out the relationships plainly: Moran Snir was CEO, Guy Snir was COO and her husband, and Shohat, one of Israel’s best known medical geneticists, was her father. The product was an attempt to copy what her father did for a living.
Both Snirs came out of Mamram, the Israel Defense Forces software unit. Moran Snir had worked at Twitter and taken an MBA at Wharton; her earlier company built Genometer, carrier screening software used in Israel since 2005. Shelly Hod Moyal of iAngels, an investor, told Globes that “Moran kept track of her father’s work for years, and has always dreamed of making these tests accessible to as many people as possible.” The company went through Y Combinator in Winter 2017 and raised about $2.5 million from Y Combinator, iAngels and Meron Capital. That was the whole capital story.
Four days in November
Invitae had been running Gia in its own direct channel for about a year. The companies signed a merger agreement on November 8, 2019, announced it on November 11, and closed on November 12. The price was approximately $50.0 million, roughly $25.0 million in cash and the rest in stock: 1,462,922 shares, priced off the 20 trading day average before signing. About $0.3 million of cash and 423,066 shares were held back for a year against indemnification. The shares went out under Section 4(a)(2) of the Securities Act, which is why no Regulation D notice exists.
“For genetics to truly go mainstream, patients and clinicians need automated workflow solutions like those Clear Genetics has created,” Invitae CEO Sean George said. Robert Nussbaum, its chief medical officer, called it infrastructure: “In some ways, they can be thought of as a digital navigator for using genetic testing to care for patients.” It was Invitae’s third acquisition in four months.
What happened to the buyer
Gia grew inside Invitae. In February 2021 the company extended it to returning results and said it had helped more than 100,000 patients, with a 92 percent satisfaction rate. That December, Obstetrics & Gynecology published a study across 180 clinics: 95,166 patients invited, 61,070 engaged, 54,547 completed the risk assessment, mean satisfaction 4.6 out of 5. Moran Snir was a co-author.
Then the balance sheet caught up. In the quarter ended June 30, 2022, after a sustained fall in its stock price, Invitae took a $2.3 billion goodwill impairment that wiped its goodwill to zero, the $26.9 million booked for Clear Genetics included. On February 13, 2024 it filed for Chapter 11 in New Jersey. Labcorp won the auction with a $239 million cash bid, the court approved the sale on May 7, and it closed on August 5, 2024.
The software outlived all of it. In May 2025 Labcorp was still selling the chatbot by name, describing it as coming from “Invitae, a leading medical genetics company that is now part of Labcorp.”
What is proven, and what is still claimed
| Evidence | What the record shows | Source type |
|---|---|---|
| Deal terms | Signed Nov 8, 2019, closed Nov 12, 2019, a two step merger intended to qualify under Section 368(a). About $50.0 million: roughly $25.0 million cash plus 1,462,922 shares, with $0.3 million cash and 423,066 shares held back. | Public record |
| Price as booked | FY2019 10-K: total $50,062K, being cash $24,645K, hold back cash $196K, hold back stock $7,294K and stock $17,927K. A further $640K of post combination expense and $0.4 million of transaction costs were expensed. | Public record |
| What Invitae bought | Developed technology of $28,293K on an eight year life, goodwill of $26,926K, net identifiable assets of $23,136K, and a $5.8 million income tax benefit from the deferred tax liability. | Public record |
| Peer reviewed evidence | Three indexed papers: Schmidlen, J Genet Couns 2019 (62 Geisinger focus group participants); Nazareth, Obstet Gynecol 2021 (95,166 invited, 64.2 percent engaged); Savage, JAMIA 2024 (chat based consent, authors disclosed as Invitae staff). | Public record |
| Named deployments | Geisinger and Huntsman Cancer Institute at announcement; the cascade testing bot reported at Cleveland Clinic, Virginia, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. | Independent |
| Usage and satisfaction | More than 100,000 patients and a 92 percent satisfaction rate, published by Invitae in 2021 and still quoted by Labcorp in 2025. The underlying survey is unpublished. | Company-stated |
| Patent challenge | OptraHealth sued Invitae over Gia on May 20, 2022 asserting US Patent 10,754,882; Invitae had sued first. Settled in December 2022 with a license. | Public record |
| Goodwill written off | Invitae impaired its entire $2,283,059K goodwill balance in the quarter ended June 30, 2022. | Public record |
| Founding year | Globes and other press reports give 2016. The Y Combinator database gives 2013. The batch, W17, is consistent. | Sources differ |
| FDA and trials | No 510(k), no PMA and no registered study under the company name as of September 23, 2026. | Not found |
Read plainly: the deal is the best documented thing here, because a listed buyer had to account for it line by line. The product evidence is real but narrow. Large numbers of patients will talk to a chatbot and say they liked it, and the bot captures family histories a clinic would miss. It does not yet show a change in cancer outcomes. The impairment that erased the goodwill says nothing about Gia in particular: Invitae wrote off everything it had ever bought.
What to watch
- Whether Labcorp keeps selling Gia by name or folds it into a broader intake product.
- Whether published evidence moves past uptake to detection and outcomes.
- Nest Genomics, founded by the Snirs in January 2022, which raised an $8.5 million seed round and sells genetics decision support inside the health record.
- The OptraHealth license, never disclosed, which now sits with Labcorp.
In their words
“Having to talk to a genetic counselor every time we want information is not an effective use of these experts.”
Moran Snir, co-founder and CEO, CNBC, 2017 · Independent
“I’m a genetic counselor. Do you think I want to be replaced by an artificial intelligence chatbot?”
Amy Curry Sturm, Geisinger, to GenomeWeb, 2018 · Independent
“We founded Clear Genetics with a mission to simplify the genetic testing process for as many people as possible by providing easy-to-use, automated tools that help both patient and clinician from initial appointment to results.”
Moran Snir, acquisition release, 2019 · Company release
“While the pandemic brought new urgency to the need for telemedicine-friendly patient tools, we’ve known for a long time that Gia can make the genetic testing process easier and more accessible for both patients and clinicians.”
Moran Snir, then head of experience platform at Invitae, 2021 release · Company release
“We have been working diligently over the past eighteen months to improve our cash position by realigning our portfolio and focusing on our most impactful business lines.”
Ken Knight, president and CEO, Invitae, Chapter 11 announcement, 2024 · Company release
Related companies
Sources
- Public recordForm 8-K, Clear Genetics merger and closing
- Public recordExhibit 99.1, Invitae to Acquire Clear Genetics
- Public recordForm 10-K FY2019, business combination note
- Public recordForm 10-K FY2022, goodwill impairment note
- Public recordEDGAR searches for Clear Genetics, Inc.
- Public recordInvitae Files for Chapter 11 Protection
- Public recordPatient assessment of chatbots in genetic counseling
- Public recordHereditary Cancer Risk Using a Genetic Chatbot
- IndependentClear Genetics is building chatbots for DNA test results
- IndependentClear Genetics Developing Chatbot to Triage Genetic Counseling
- IndependentGeisinger Deploys ‘Gia’ Chatbot
- IndependentInvitae buys chatbot co Clear Genetics for $50m
- IndependentInvitae Accused of Patent Violation With Chatbot
- IndependentInvitae, OptraHealth Resolve Chatbot Patent Dispute
- IndependentLabcorp to acquire Invitae assets for $239M
- CompanyLabcorp Finalizes Acquisition of Invitae Assets
- CompanyFour benefits of AI chatbots in genetic testing
Profile researched and written by Healthcare Discovery. Last updated September 29, 2026.
