by the numbers

Houston sees boom of startup development support, new report reveals

The city of Houston is home to more than 60 startup development organizations, such as incubators and accelerators, according to the Greater Houston Partnership's 2022 Houston Facts report. Photo via Getty Images

Houston’s startup ecosystem is more robust than you might think.

A new report from the Greater Houston Partnership shows the region is home to more than 60 startup development organizations, such as incubators and accelerators.

“These organizations have formed a growing web of resources assisting tech entrepreneurs across the Houston region,” the report says.

Among those organizations are:

  • At least 30 incubators and accelerators
  • Coworking spaces
  • Makerspaces
  • Colleges and university programs
  • Nonprofit initiatives

Houston’s burgeoning startup ecosystem continues to garner global attention.

StartupBlink, a startup ecosystem research center, places Houston at No. 49 on its recent list of the world’s top startup ecosystems. Meanwhile, Houston lands at No. 5 in Startup Genome’s recent ranking of the world’s top emerging startup ecosystems. Startup Genome is an advisory and research group that seeks to boost startup ecosystems.

“There are several reasons why startups choose Houston,” Startup Genome reported in 2019. “The city seems to have it all — relatively low cost of living, the [third] largest concentration of Fortune 500 companies, and a growing base of female founders supported by a wealth of organizations and nonprofits aimed at providing resources for women entrepreneurs.”

The Greater Houston Partnership report declares that the Innovation Corridor sits “at the nucleus of Houston’s tech ecosystem.” Rice University’s $100 million The Ion tech hub anchors the corridor as well as Midtown’s Innovation District. The hub features commercial office space, coworking space, and common space for events and programs.

Among Houston’s notable incubators and accelerators are MassChallenge, the Ion Smart Cities Accelerator, Gener8tor, JLabs, Greentown Labs, and TMC Innovation, according to the report. The report points out that TMC Innovation, which includes all of the member institutions within the Texas Medical Center, has accelerated 221 companies that collectively have raised more $5.2 billion in venture capital since its founding in 2014.

Much of the VC that flows into Houston goes to energy startups, according to the report. Drivers of this VC influx include Shell Ventures, Chevron Technology Ventures, ConocoPhillips Technology Exploitation, Aramco Ventures, and BP ventures.

In all, the Houston area is home to over 800 VC-backed startups that have hauled in more than $4.35 billion in VC over the past five years, says the report.

On the academic front, the report notes the presence of startup-promoting programs such as the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, Rice’s Owlspark Accelerator, the Rice Business Plan Competition, the University of Houston’s Cyvia and Melvyn Wolff Center for Entrepreneurship, UH’s Red Labs startup incubator and accelerator program, and UH’s Cougar Venture Fund.

Among the nonprofit initiatives cited in the report are Impact Hub Houston, BioHouston, and the HX Venture Fund. The fund “seeks to transform Houston into a world-leading hub for innovation by linking outside investors to local startups,” the report says.

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A research team housed out of the newly launched Rice Biotech Launch Pad received funding to scale tech that could slash cancer deaths in half. Photo via Rice University

A research funding agency has deployed capital into a team at Rice University that's working to develop a technology that could cut cancer-related deaths in half.

Rice researchers received $45 million from the National Institutes of Health's Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, or ARPA-H, to scale up development of a sense-and-respond implant technology. Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh leads the team developing the technology as principal investigator.

“Instead of tethering patients to hospital beds, IV bags and external monitors, we’ll use a minimally invasive procedure to implant a small device that continuously monitors their cancer and adjusts their immunotherapy dose in real time,” he says in a news release. “This kind of ‘closed-loop therapy’ has been used for managing diabetes, where you have a glucose monitor that continuously talks to an insulin pump. But for cancer immunotherapy, it’s revolutionary.”

Joining Veiseh on the 19-person research project named THOR, which stands for “targeted hybrid oncotherapeutic regulation,” is Amir Jazaeri, co-PI and professor of gynecologic oncology at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The device they are developing is called HAMMR, or hybrid advanced molecular manufacturing regulator.

“Cancer cells are continually evolving and adapting to therapy. However, currently available diagnostic tools, including radiologic tests, blood assays and biopsies, provide very infrequent and limited snapshots of this dynamic process," Jazaeri adds. "As a result, today’s therapies treat cancer as if it were a static disease. We believe THOR could transform the status quo by providing real-time data from the tumor environment that can in turn guide more effective and tumor-informed novel therapies.”

With a national team of engineers, physicians, and experts across synthetic biology, materials science, immunology, oncology, and more, the team will receive its funding through the Rice Biotech Launch Pad, a newly launched initiative led by Veiseh that exists to help life-saving medical innovation scale quickly.

"Rice is proud to be the recipient of the second major funding award from the ARPA-H, a new funding agency established last year to support research that catalyzes health breakthroughs," Rice President Reginald DesRoches says. "The research Rice bioengineer Omid Veiseh is doing in leading this team is truly groundbreaking and could potentially save hundreds of thousands of lives each year. This is the type of research that makes a significant impact on the world.”

The initial focus of the technology will be on ovarian cancer, and this funding agreement includes a first-phase clinical trial of HAMMR for the treatment of recurrent ovarian cancer that's expected to take place in the fourth year of THOR’s multi-year project.

“The technology is broadly applicable for peritoneal cancers that affect the pancreas, liver, lungs and other organs,” Veiseh says. “The first clinical trial will focus on refractory recurrent ovarian cancer, and the benefit of that is that we have an ongoing trial for ovarian cancer with our encapsulated cytokine ‘drug factory’ technology. We'll be able to build on that experience. We have already demonstrated a unique model to go from concept to clinical trial within five years, and HAMMR is the next iteration of that approach.”

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