TimeTeller Puts Our Internal Clocks at the Center of Personal Medicine

German startup TimeTeller has developed a saliva test kit to help anyone understand their circadian rhythm. The aim is to reduce the side effects of cancer treatments.

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Home health tests have been plagued by exaggerated claims and outright fraud. But German startup TimeTeller, which has created a saliva testing kit to help anyone understand their circadian rhythm, is led by CEO Angela Relogio, who is the polar opposite of disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.

Relógio is a physicist-engineer and molecular biologist who spent years researching oncology, circadian biology and systems medicine in Germany before leaving university to build TimeTeller. He is careful about what today's test can and cannot do.

It's easy to oversell: Relógio's last name means "clock" in his native Portuguese, and TimeTeller has the potential to reduce side effects from cancer treatment and improve outcomes by timing treatment with each patient's internal clock. It's also why he's careful to warn that his TimeTeller operates in two timelines.

The long-term goal is to determine when cancer treatments are better tolerated and more effective, and this is much more accurate than saying whether a person is a morning person or a night owl. But the direct-to-consumer kit doesn't help patients figure it out on their own. "This is something we have to calculate for every drug; we do it in the context of clinical studies," warned Relógio.

According to Relógio, TimeTeller began accepting direct orders due to demand from longevity clinics, which focus on healthy aging and understand that individual data about a person's circadian rhythm can be used to provide personalized recommendations on sleep, nutrition, light exposure and physical activity.

TimeTeller can also be applied to metabolic diseases (such as diabetes) and neurological diseases (such as Alzheimer's), performance and women's health, but cancer is its main mission. It was while studying cancer that Relógio made a discovery that caused him to drop out of college.

He found that many cancer patients stopped or started treatment because of side effects. "As a scientist, it was impossible to watch, especially when I became convinced that part of the problem might be not only what treatment we do, but when we do it," Relógio said. This led him to create the Circadian Rhythm Test at the core of TimeTeller - which he knew had to become a company.

"I personally secured the first patent because I strongly believed that this discovery should not remain in scientific journals," he said. His startup came out of Berlin's Charité University Hospital, but has since moved to the Hamburg Medical School, which provided access to patients and funding. It also offered a fallback: hiring back-ups for TimeTeller's 10-person team if the company couldn't pay them.

This is a safety net that TimeTeller may not need. With biochemist and market access specialist Benjamin Dose as one of the founders, the startup partnered with Techniker Krankenkasse, one of Germany's largest health insurance providers. Relógio said the partnership began as a reimbursement deal where the insurer reimburses the cost of the test for a subset of cancer patients, and both parties are now ready to expand it to more than 12 million insurer members.

Despite its warnings about direct-to-consumer testing, TimeTeller has become a solution that cancer patients can truly afford. Ahead of his appearance at TechCrunch Disrupt, where Relógio took the stage today in San Francisco as part of our Startup Battlefield storytelling competition, he made it clear that the company has broader ambitions: a future where asking "when" is central to precision medicine because "almost every process in our bodies is timed."

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Anna Heim is a writer and editorial consultant.

You can contact or confirm Anna by emailing annatechcrunch [at].

As a freelance reporter at TechCrunch since 2021, he covers a wide range of startup-related topics including artificial intelligence, fintech and insurance, SaaS and pricing, and global venture capital trends.

From May 2025, his reporting for TechCrunch focuses on Europe's hottest startup stories.

Anna moderates panels and conducts on-stage interviews at industry events of all sizes, including major tech conferences like TechCrunch Disrupt, 4YFN, South Summit, TNW Conference, VivaTech, and many others.

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