·E94

#94 Reinventing Continuous Glucose Monitoring (CGM): Molecular Wearables, Micro Sensors and Building SAVA with Renato Circi

Dec 22, 2025

24 mins

Episode Description

Renato (Ren) Circi, co-founder of SAVA, a London based MedTech company building a new generation of minimally invasive continuous glucose monitors and molecular wearables.

In this episode we rewind to the underground labs at Imperial College London where Ren and his co-founder Raph first immersed themselves in biosensors and began questioning the status quo of health monitoring. Ren explains how their shared obsession with measuring the body more effortlessly led to SAVA’s founding and what it really looks like to push through years of scientific failure in order to build a complex medical device platform.

We dive into why SAVA manufactures everything in-house, how their micro sensor architecture differs from traditional filament based CGMs and why controlling every layer from chemistry to algorithms is essential if you want to iterate fast on performance. Ren sets out SAVA’s long term vision of continuous molecular tracking for everyone, not just people with diabetes, and what could be unlocked once you can monitor many molecules in real time from a single patch.

We also talk about regulatory expectations for CGMs, the reality of one way product decisions in medical devices and the difficulty of fundraising for a consumer facing yet highly regulated deep tech company. Ren closes with candid reflections on what he would do differently, how he protects time for family and why working on a problem you truly care about with people you genuinely like is the only way to survive the journey.

Timestamps

[00:00:21] Origins at Imperial and discovering biosensors

[00:01:59] Long horizons, repeated failure and staying in the game

[00:03:56] Why SAVA manufactures everything in-house

[00:06:46] How SAVA’s micro sensor CGM platform actually works

[00:09:36] From diabetes to universal molecular health monitoring

[00:12:02] Patient experience and CGM adoption in healthcare systems

[00:13:43] When CGMs become cheaper than finger-pricks

[00:15:15] Misconceptions about CGM and continuous molecular sensing

[00:17:21] Why building CGMs is one of the hardest engineering challenges

[00:22:54] Fundraising in unconventional deep tech MedTech and advice for founders

Connect with Ren - ⁠⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/circi/⁠