MORGANTOWN – Country Road Angel Network continues to celebrate its mission of fostering West Virginia entrepreneurism. Members met in Wheeling Monday evening to review their successes, get updates on ventures they’ve worked with and hear a couple new pitches.
CRAN – for short – was formed in 2019 to provide early stage seed funding for entrepreneurs. President Judy Moore said they’ve grown to 35 member investors (from 32 when we last reported on CRAN in November) and invested $1.5 million in seed funds in five companies (three of them from Morgantown), which enabled them to raise $8 million more.
CRAN’s first investment was Morgantown-based Iconic Air, founded by two WVU alumni, Kyle Gillis
and James Carnes, who won the West Virginia Business Plan Competition as juniors.
Their company mission adapted as they learned what the market wanted, Gillis said. “We were just nerds who liked being in a garage and shooting YouTube videos.”
They started with drones collecting air quality data, pivoted to industrial sensing systems, then found their true niche in enterprise software, aggregating carbon emissions data for large oil and gas businesses to help them shrink their carbon footprint.
They’re now working with Diversified Energy, which operates in the Appalachian Basin from Tennessee to Pennsylvania and in the Gulf area of Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana, and acquires mature assets to optimize them and make them safer and improve the environmental footprint and plug them when they reach the end of their useful lives.
Iconinc Air’s growth plan, Carnes said, includes expanding its staff from 15 people now to 30-50.
One of the two pitches members heard was for a Morgantown company headed by WVU professor Nancy Guo.
Her company, Sostos, she said, is dedicated to accelerating cancer treatments. Her product is called CATOS – Cancer Treatment Optimization Solutions, starting with cancer screenings and ranging to new drug options for patients who’ve suffered failed therapies.
Tempus genomic sequencing, she said, can develop chemotherapy selection algorithms. And CATOS-LU can predict tumor recurrence, who benefits from chemotherapy and which of the 21 available drugs will benefit a patient in order to implement earlier treatments and improve patients’ chances of longer-term survival.
“People don’t have to waste tome or money or suffer from side effects from the drugs they do not respond to,” she said.
In 2022, she said, she filed 10 patents. This year she’s seeking $1 million seed money, looking toward up to $10 million Series A funding (the first round of funding after seed capital) next year for market expansion for lung cancer treatment.
Members will hear more from Guo and others in the coming weeks.
Tweet David Beard @dbeardtdp Email dbeard@dominionpost.com
