Early this year, CircNova, a Michigan startup, raised a $3.3 million seed round for its innovative technology, which utilizes AI to target Cellular RNA.
The funding round was led by Houston, Texas-based South Loop Ventures with participation from Dug Song, Union Heritage, Michigan Rise, Invest Detroit, Kalamazoo Forward Ventures, and SPARK Capital.
It was good news for the startup world as the funding was to help in the swift development of therapies for conditions that have no available treatments at the moment. It was also a positive development for Crystal Brown, the CEO of CircNova, who also helped start it.
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She had entered the biotech industry by accident, as until seven years ago, she had been in the automotive manufacturing industry and thought she was rising in the field to become a “C-suite automotive executive.” Things changed when a friend introduced her to a CEO behind a life science startup who was looking for a business manager.
Brown accepted the role out of curiosity, using her business skills from auto factories to help the startup succeed. Along the way, some of her friends encouraged her to leave automotive and enter biotech full time.
“I was like, no one’s gonna take me seriously. I’ve never studied biology. I studied poli sci and women’s studies,” she recounted to TechCrunch.
But she did still leave automotive and began learning about startups and how to raise money. Eventually, she rose to director of operations and when the company went public, she had enough payout to purchase a house. With the money she had earned, she also unveiled her own biotech startup but later closed it down after making certain mistakes like hiring too quickly. Two years after starting her company, she shut it down due to lack of funding. But since she had already built a solid reputation among the Michigan startup community, it didn’t take long for her to rise again in the field.
In May 2023, she founded CircNova with scientist Joe Deangelo. CircNova is a biotechnology company behind the AI NovaEngine, which can “generate, analyze, and identify circular RNA (ribonucleic acid) for therapeutic development,” according to the company’s LinkedIn. Circular RNA is a relatively newly discovered class of structures that form a circle rather than a strand, TechCrunch said. “It regulates critical biological processes, and the hope is that therapies based on these molecules will be able to target complex health issues,” the platform wrote.
The goal is to “treat diseases we haven’t treated so far, things like ovarian cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, rare genetic diseases,” said the University of Michigan graduate, Brown.
