The only way this company stays alive without significant venture funding (which it appears they don't have) is through partnering with pharmas. From reading their privacy policy, it looks like they are de-identifying genotypic and phenotypic data from users. This, at scale, creates a nice population based genetics study so that if I'm a pharma, I can look at a specific biomarker and all data associated with it. That helps me build drugs against certain genes, diseases, etc.

So yes, you are the still the product and yes, your data is being resold.

At one point, we thought that simply replacing a user's IP with a unique ID was enough to anonymise.

At one point, a blur or pixelating filter on a photo was sufficient to anonymise it.

At one point, Monero transactions were considered anonymous.

That means that by definition, anonymizing genomes is impossible. If someone tells you they will 'anonymize' your genome data, run away, they don't know what they are doing.

http://41j.com/blog/2018/11/illumina-consumables-are-90-prof...

Their overall gross margin is >60%. I suspect that instrument margins are actually also quite high, but they factor in R&D spending on instrument costs.

However, Dante labs appear to be using BGI, not Illumina for sequencing.

Also, in their About Us section they have every technology listed under the sun (Illumina, PacBio, Thermo, BGI) so I think it's just whatever they can get their hands on based on which labs have open runs. Seems quite questionable from a data integrity perspective if you're trying to do population based genetics. The quality between sequencers varies dramatically.

The BGI (MGI) have been pushing out new instruments, reportedly with lower error rates (and much cheaper than Illumina).

They’ve also been building out service centers outside China, and I suspect this is where the sequencing being done by this service is located.

Universities do sometimes offer sequencing as a service, but I suspect not at as low a price point as the BGI, even for those universities with attached genome centers.

We go up against universities all the time in our competitive deals. They're generally always cheaper since everything is subsidized however the turnaround times are usually significant and the quality is not entirely repeatable. The cost here looks heavily subsidized just as a way to spark interest.

Even so, Dante is currently definitely operating at a loss. That’s not a problem though since their business model probably isn’t really consumer genetics. Likely, their actual business model (like that of every major player in the field) is gathering large panels of sequence data to either analyse themselves (and then sell the insight to pharmaceutical companies) or to sell (pseudonymised or aggregate) access to companies. So, in reality, they are preparing large-scale biomedical studies. And not only are they not paying study participants (their ostensible “customers”), they are actually getting the study participants to pay for their participation.

(Note that there’s nothing necessarily nefarious about this whole business. It just explains why they can offer their product to consumers “at a loss”. In reality it’s simply an investment.)