We don’t sell a glimpse of your biology. We read it.

Most consumer tests don’t actually sequence you. 23andMe uses a genotyping microarray that reads a pre-selected panel of roughly a million genetic markers — a fraction of a percent of your genome. It’s designed to answer questions someone else chose in advance; everything outside that panel is simply invisible. uBiome built its microbiome tests on 16S rRNA sequencing, which can tell you a bacterium’s rough family but rarely its species, and can say nothing about what that microbe actually does.

We work at full resolution. Whole-genome, long-read sequencing that captures the entire genome — including the structural variation, repeats, and hard-to-read regions that arrays miss — paired with shotgun metagenomics and metatranscriptomics that resolve microbial communities down to the strain and the gene. The whole picture, not a postcard of it.

A taxonomic list and a wellness score answer the easy question — who’s there — and stop. The hard question, the one that actually matters, is what can they do, and what does it mean. That question is the center of our science. Our tools are built to annotate function across genes and pathways, and to illuminate biology’s “dark matter”: the vast fraction of every genome that current tools leave blank. We don’t hand you a census. We hand you an explanation.

Credit where it’s due — Viome is the one competitor that measures activity rather than mere presence, using RNA to see which microbial genes are switched on. That’s real science. But it funnels a single proprietary readout into a closed recommendation engine attached to a supplement business. We do multi-omics — genomic, metagenomic, and transcriptomic — with methods you can actually inspect, and no product to upsell at the end of the report.

Every consumer platform in this space runs on proprietary, closed algorithms. You cannot see how they reached their conclusions, and neither can any independent scientist. Our tools are open-source, peer-reviewed, and reproducible — the actual gold standard of science, where a result only counts if someone else can run it and get the same answer. When we tell you something about your biology, we can show you exactly how we know.

The consumer category has a documented validation problem. uBiome’s clinical tests were charged by the Department of Justice as not validated and not medically necessary. Across direct-to-consumer wellness testing, the leap from a sequencing result to a personalized “eat this, take that” recommendation frequently outruns the evidence behind it.

Our methods clear a higher bar because they have to. They’re validated in peer review and relied upon by the global research community, and they’re funded by the most demanding scientific sponsors in the world — NASA, NIH, NSF, USDA, and the DOE Joint Genome Institute. Agencies like these don’t reimburse marketing claims. They fund methods that work.

This is the part the consumer companies would rather you not think about. In 2025, 23andMe filed for bankruptcy, and the genetic data of roughly 15 million customers became an asset to be sold in court — a sale that multiple state attorneys general formally opposed on privacy grounds before it was completed. uBiome ended in an FBI raid and bankruptcy, with its founders charged with fraud and now considered fugitives. When you hand your most sensitive biological data to a venture-backed consumer startup, you are quietly betting on that startup’s solvency and its ethics. That bet has not always paid off.

We are a science-first, scientist-led operation — accountable to peer review, to institutional oversight, and to the standards of professional research, not to a growth funnel.

Underneath all of the above is the simplest difference of all. The consumer players are, at heart, marketing companies with a laboratory attached. RAW Molecular Systems is a laboratory with the software built in — founded and led by a working scientist who authored 88 peer-reviewed papers, engineered the analysis tools himself, and is answerable to the toughest reviewers in science. Not an app and a supplement subscription. An instrument, and the expertise to read it.