Nikolina
Lauc —
the sugar
on the
antibody.

01 — THE STORYThe pitch, briefly.

GlycanAge sells a blood test. You order it, you take it, a lab in the UK reads the sugars glued onto your immune system's antibodies, and a few weeks later a number arrives that describes, roughly, how old your immune system thinks you are. Nikolina Lauc runs the company that sends the number. She is 32, Croatian, dyslexic, and, as of late 2025, the CEO of a 53-person longevity diagnostics business that has raised something in the neighbourhood of seven million dollars against a research base that took roughly forty million euros of European grants to produce.

The research base belongs to her father. Prof. Gordan Lauc has spent about two decades running one of the more prolific glycobiology programs in Europe, at the University of Zagreb and at Genos, the private institute where the plasma glycome was first mapped at scale in 2009 and the IgG glycome in 2011. GlycanAge, founded in 2020, is what happens when the daughter of that lab decides the research should be a product. She calls it unlocking the human glycome. The commercial version is a small box, a finger prick, and a login.

Lauc is not, by training, a scientist. She is a serial operator who founded her first company at 18 - graphic design and events, in Croatia, the way lots of teenage entrepreneurs start - and built a peer-to-peer travel SaaS during university, then moved through property and consumer ventures, growing several of them past three million in revenue without outside capital. When GlycanAge needed its first investor, she wrote the cheque. This is a story she tells cleanly, without much drama, but it is a specific data point about the state of the female founder market, where roughly two per cent of venture dollars go to women-led companies, and about her own conviction.

Family science.

The GlycanAge origin story is a father-daughter one, and Lauc is candid about the arc. She grew up in a house where meaningful work outranked income as a metric. She didn't study biology. She spent years half-listening to her father talk about IgG glycosylation before, at some point, she describes the realization arriving: my father is not crazy - he's brilliant. That's the sentence you want in a founding story, even if it required years of stubbornness on both sides to earn.

The commercial argument is simple enough. Chronological age is a birthday. Biological age is a set of measurements. Glycans - the sugar chains attached to antibodies and other proteins - shift with inflammation, hormonal state, stress, and lifestyle. Read the glycans and you get a proxy for the aging of the immune system. GlycanAge's contribution isn't the underlying idea; it's turning a research assay into a shippable product, marketing it to consumers and, increasingly, clinicians, and building a repeatable UX around a retest six months later.

Two cheques and a lab.

The funding history is short and legible. A seed round announced in 2022 brought in around $4.2 million, closed under the Croatian founding story. A €3.9 million round followed in early 2024. Late 2025 brought another tranche, taking cumulative funding to roughly seven million dollars. For a UK biotech operating a wet-lab component, headcount of 53, and international sales, that is a company running lean by category standards. Lauc has talked about capital efficiency as a byproduct of the way she was trained to run businesses - which is to say without much choice - during her Croatian startup years.

Believe in yourself. Sometimes all you need is a little belief in yourself or somebody believing in you. If there's not somebody, there's always you.— Nikolina Lauc

The operator's rulebook.

Two rules Lauc talks about often, both of which are load-bearing for how she runs GlycanAge. The first is delegation: nobody is going to die. The phrase comes from a moment of handing off responsibility she'd been holding herself; the moral is that most operational catastrophes founders imagine are, on inspection, not catastrophes. The second is stress: everything is connected to stress. That one has a scientific through-line - chronic inflammation shows up in the glycan profile, and stress is upstream of inflammation - and a management through-line, which is that a burned-out CEO tests badly on her own company's test.

She has, at different points, done silent meditation retreats, hired to solve her own bottlenecks rather than adding to them, and rewritten her sleep schedule around her circadian preferences. Founders talk about these things a lot. Lauc talks about them with the resignation of someone who has looked at the readout.

The dyslexic CEO.

Lauc has spoken publicly about being dyslexic, and about running a research-heavy company as someone who wasn't the traditional academic candidate for the role. It is a useful biographical detail because it explains something about how she operates: she pattern-matches, she delegates deeply on the science, and she treats the founder job as translation between two audiences - the lab, which cares about statistical power, and the customer, who wants a number and a recommendation.

The other thing worth noting is that she is an extroverted founder in a category that leans introverted. GlycanAge's marketing surface - podcasts, conference stages, TV segments - runs through her. She has appeared on Liz Earle's wellbeing show, on BBC Click, and across the longevity podcast circuit; she has spoken on the HealthConf stage at Collision in Toronto, at Web Summit Vancouver, and at the Longevity Med Summit, where she gave a talk on the role of women's hormones on biological ageing. This is deliberate. Preventive-health testing is a category that has to be sold, because nobody wakes up wanting a diagnostic.

03 — TIMELINEHow she got here.

04 — VOICESWhat she says.