When COVID-19 shut the world down in 2020, Marlon Millard had a problem. He was in the middle of working on a PhD in medicinal chemistry and, as a self-described “lab-rat,” the pandemic closures meant he was unable to continue his studies in the research facility.
Rather than patiently waiting for everything to reopen, Millard pivoted. “I thought, ‘instead of building molecules, maybe I could build a business,” he said.
With the world very much invested in non-invasive saliva testing to manage the spread of COVID-19, Millard pondered whether technology he learned in a previous job could play a more permanent role in sports.
In 2021, he founded health-tech startup Biolyz. The company conducts saliva testing for professional sports teams, providing analysis on dozens of biomarkers that touch immunology, inflammation, sleep, hydration, psychological stress and more. The clubs use that data, as well as additional information gathered through other testing methods, to aid in the management of the training loads and performance of their athletes.
So far, Biolyz has amassed eight soccer clients across continental Europe, between full-time customers and those testing the service on a trial basis. That includes top German clubs Borussia Dortmund and Bayer Leverkusen, as well as other squads in the Netherlands and Italy. It also works with multiple cycling teams.
More recently, Biolyz has expanded its operations to the U.K. In April, the company raised $5.3 million (€4.5 million) in a funding round backed by Apex Capital, Dopamine Ventures, Hyrox world champion Imke Salander and ElevenLabs operations exec Victoria Weller. Biolyz used the money to build a third lab in England, adding to facilities in Germany and Austria. That opened the doors to another two full-time customers in the EFL Championship and three trialists among the ranks of the Premier League, bringing the company’s total count to 13 soccer clubs.
Next, Millard wants to cross the Atlantic in 2027 and build a lab in the U.S. To support that, he’s already in the very early stages of discussing a capital raise somewhere between $17 million (€15 million) and $29 million (€25 million) at a valuation he wouldn’t disclose but hinted that it could be “a bit more” than $50 million.
It’s a lofty goal for a company that is just now nearing $1.2 million (€1 million) in annual recurring revenue.
“It was quite a no-brainer for us to go to the U.K. when it comes to football,” Millard said. “But when it comes to professional sports overall as a whole, the U.S. is obviously also the biggest market for us.”
Building enough trust to capitalize on his idea took time in the beginning, Millard recalled. Before formally founding the business, he was invited to present in front of two or three people at Austria’s Olympic Center in 2021. To his surprise, the room was filled with 40 or so folks when Millard arrived, showing the early interest in his product.
He rallied support out of that gathering and started collaborating with a Vienna-based soccer club on early models a year later. Once Millard had enough data, he pitched Borussia Dortmund on applying the progress in a Champions League setting. The club agreed to a rigorous trial period over the course of several months during the 2024-25 season, ending with Biolyz signing the Dortmund to its first commercial contract.
The company’s work would not go unnoticed in the German soccer industry. Malte Krüger, a PhD who leads the sports science department at Bayer Leverkusen, heard about Biolyz’s trials at Dortmund and knew a couple of guys working as consultants with the startup. After getting in touch with the company, Leverkusen tested the service through the end of last season, and this summer, the club signed a multiyear contract.
Biolyz isn’t the only biomarker test Leverkusen uses; the team also utilizes capillary blood draws through the fingertip or earlobe. Krüger is bullish on how all forms of internal load data can further individualize training regimens for athletes, comparing the evolution of the space to the introduction of GPS-tracking data into sports. His expectation is that many clubs will add saliva-based testing to their toolboxes over the next five years. For now, he’s eager to find any edge he can for the players at Leverkusen.
“We don’t have the big budget of the top three clubs in the Bundesliga,” Krüger said. “So I think we have to be very good in other areas to optimize performance, and therefore our science and medical departments quite well budgeted. We need to take everything we get here and try to be ahead a little bit in comparison to our competitors.”
Of course, it’s hard to look at any biotech startup pitching breakthroughs in medical testing without conjuring memories of Theranos. The disgraced company, founded by Elizabeth Holmes, raised more than $700 million dollars and falsely claimed it could perform hundreds of medical tests using only a drop of blood with its proprietary “Edison” machine. It eventually collapsed under a massive fraud scandal, and Holmes went to federal prison.
Millard understands the sentiment. In fact, he once wrote a LinkedIn post that said, “we are like Theranos but not a scam.” Rather than trying to miniaturize the entire testing infrastructure into a small and convenient device, Biolyz uses a large, complex and expensive mass spectrometry technology. “It’s not something you can just give any lab or any person to get a hundred biomarkers out of it,” Millard said.
That size and complexity do present an obstacle to the company’s growth. Even though it only takes about a minute to collect a sample from an athlete, those specimens then need to be processed at a nearby lab. Putting aside the transport logistics, which generally puts turnaround in the 24 hours range, Biolyz can only handle about 160,000 samples annually. Millard expects to push that number to about 200,000 with improvements to the company’s methods and some additional infrastructure.
As the Biolyz scales, Millard is aware of the skeptics, especially in what he describes as a “trust business.” Although, he’s not worried about showing the industry what his enterprise is capable of.
“I think data says more than a thousand words,” Millard said.
