10 most promising Texas startups revealed at inaugural Houston summit

Winner, winner

Station Houston CEO Gabriella Rowe and Rice Alliance Managing Partner Brad Burke named 10 startups to watch. Photo by Natalie Harms

Texas is booming with digital startups, and Station Houston and the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship hosted a meeting of the minds to discuss the digital revolution at the inaugural Texas Digital Summit at Rice University on December 6.

Thirty-nine companies presented throughout the day; among the group were 26 from the Houston area. At the conclusion of the day, Gabriella Rowe, CEO of Station Houston, and Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance, announced 10 "most promising companies" that stood out to a group of investors who attended the event.

All 10 selected were Texas-based, with eight from the Houston area. Here's who the venture capitalists and investors picked for the prize.

Houston-based SafePass

Photo via safepassglobal.com

SafePass pictures a world where visitors on school or corporate campuses can be tracked. The company's technology upends the standard paper or sticker pass you get from the front office, and provides a reusable, trackable device for visitors.

"Our tracking algorithm interacts with already existing WiFi technology — so, the routers that are already at that facility," says Ronald Huff, managing director of SafePass. "We leverage that to get that real-time tracking information."

Houston-based ScribeRule

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ScribeRule operates under the assumption that your company's data has already been breached. The software protects data from both internal and external threats so that companies don't have to worry about any type of threat. The technology is scalable and easy to use.

"The problem is very simple," says Chris Melson, president and COO. "Only allow people who are authorized to see your data, see the data. And that's the problem we've solved."

"It's very difficult to protect data in a collaborative environment."

Houston-based Sensoleak

Photo via sensoleak.com

Sensoleak is making it easier for monitors in the oil and gas industry to be alerted about leaks. Using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and internet of things combined into a software, the company is providing a revolutionary solution for a longstanding problem.

"The problem right now is there is a lot of false alarms," says Shoshi Kaganovsky, founder and CEO, "and if there is a leak, it has to leak a lot before it is caught."

The company recently opened a new round of funding.

Sugar Land-based Commtrex

Photo via commtrex.com

The only open, electronic marketplace for rail shippers and asset providers is right in Houston's backyard of Sugar Land. Commtrex makes communications and connections between these transportation entities more efficient and better executed.

"Commtrex's asset management tools and market data is based on real transactions, and benefits our member companies with engagement efficiencies and financial insights," reads the website.

Houston-based Zenus

Photo via zenus-biometrics.com

Let's face it, face recognition is the future of identification, and Zenus has an award-winning technology to move the needle. Utilizing face recognition doesn't need to compromise privacy.

"We are a leading provider of face recognition software," reads the website. "Our cloud-based service can search a database of faces within a blink of an eye and it can be seamlessly integrated into any application."

Houston-based 3GiG

Photo via 3-gig.com

3GiG is a one-stop shop software company for the "oval office" needs of oil and gas companies. Energy leaders can use the services to manage projects, prospects, and more. President and CEO Kandy Lukats compares her company's services to the trending meal kits — like Blue Apron or Hello Fresh —Americans have been crazy about — all the ingredients sent right to your door.

"We believe we've found the niche between the freezer section and doing it yourself," she says.

Austin-based Towny

Photo via towny.com

This Austin company is making it more appealing to shop local. Towny looks to work in cities with under a million residents. The tool is for small, consumer-focused businesses to market their store to consumers. The small business owners pay a flat monthly rate to utilize digital marketing tools from the convenience of their phones.

Towny is already in five towns with 500 clients, says CEO Nathan Baumeister. In January, the company's monthly revenue was $17,000, but for the last two months, the tool has raked in $90,000 monthly.

"We've built a branding, mobile-first platform, where we've taken all these technologies and tactics and put it together in one package at the affordable price of $199 per month," he says.

Dallas-based CommandHound

Photo via commandhound.com

CommandHound is a B2B software that tracks employee tasks and responsibilities. It reminds users on assigned duties and keeps a record of work outcomes for later performance reviews.

"Our ultimate solution is to turn every organization into a high-performance organization through accountability," says Rene Larrave, chairman and CEO. "It's a checklist on steroids."

Houston-based SecurityGate

Photo via securitygate.io

SecurityGate is disrupting the cyber compliance and the cyber regulation market by providing cyber risk assessments at a faster rate than a human auditor could. The software analyzes data, identifies potential cyber security risks, and communicates with the company how to address the threats.

"No matter what industry vertical you're in, every single supply chain out there is worries about supply chain cyber security," says CEO Ted Gutierrez. "And the problem with that, is everyone is doing it manually."

Houston-based DeepCast.ai

Photo via deepcast.ai

Using artificial intelligence and physics, DeepCast.ai can automate operations for industrial companies.

"We simply integrate with system solutions, try to clean and facilitate the data using AI models important to the oil and gas industry," says Arturo Klie, chief technology officer and senior software engineer. "Once the data is clean, we apply our business-informed AI models to solve and provide forecasting real time and analytics.

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UH, Baylor researchers make breakthrough with new pediatric leukemia treatment device

childhood cancer

A team of Houston researchers has developed a new microfluidic device aimed at making treatments safer for children with hyperleukocytosis, a life-threatening hematologic emergency often seen in patients with leukemia.

Dr. Fong Lam, an associate professor of pediatrics at Baylor College of Medicine and a pediatric intensive care physician at Texas Children’s Hospital, partnered with Sergey Shevkoplyas, a professor of biomedical engineering at UH, on the device that uses a large number of tiny channels to quickly separate blood cells by size in a process called controlled incremental filtration, according to a news release from UH.

They tested whether performing cell separation with a high-throughput microfluidic device could alleviate the limitations of traditional conventional blood-filtering machines, which pose risks for pediatric patients due to their large extracorporeal volume (ECV), high flow rates and tendency to cause significant platelet loss in the patient. The results of their study, led by Mubasher Iqbal, a Ph.D. candidate in biomedical engineering at UH, were published recently in the journal Nature Communications.

“Continuously and efficiently separating leukocytes from recirculating undiluted whole blood — without device clogging and cell activation or damage — has long been a major challenge in microfluidic cell separation,” Shevkoplyas said in a news release. “Our study is the first to solve this problem.”

Hyperleukocytosis is a condition that develops when the body has an extremely high number of white blood cells, which in many cases is due to leukemia. According to the release, up to 20 percent to 30 percent of patients with acute leukemia develop hyperleukocytosis, and this places them at risk for potentially fatal complications.

The new device utilizes tiny channels—each about the width of a human hair—to efficiently separate blood cells through controlled incremental filtration. According to Lam, the team was excited that the new device could operate at clinically relevant flow rates.

The device successfully removed approximately 85 percent of large leukocytes and 90 percent of leukemic blasts from undiluted human whole blood without causing platelet loss or other adverse effects. It also operates with an ECV that’s about 1/70th of conventional leukapheresis machines, which makes it particularly suitable for infants and small children.

“Overall, our study suggests that microfluidics leukapheresis is safe and effective at selectively removing leukocytes from circulation, with separation performance sufficiently high to ultimately enable safe leukapheresis in children,” Shevkoplyas said in the release.

Greentown Labs adds 5 new Houston startups to climatetech incubator

Going Green

Greentown Labs announced that it added five startups to its Houston community in Q1 of 2025.

The companies are among a group of 19 that joined the climatetech incubator, which is co-located in Houston and Boston, in the same time period. The companies that joined the Houston-based lab specialize in a number of "green" applications, from converting plastic waste into sustainable materials to developing energy-storage solutions.

The new Houston members include:

  • Concept Loop, a project of Pakistan-based Innova8e Inc., aims to repurpose post-industrial and post-consumer plastic waste into sustainable building materials.
  • GeoFuels, a Sugar Land-based company that produces hydrogen by using baseload geothermal power and methane pyrolysis.
  • PLASENE, a Houston-based company with an innovative platform that converts plastic waste into liquid fuel and low-carbon hydrogen through its proprietary catalysts and modular, scalable, pre-engineered units platform. The company was named to Greentown's ACCEL Year 3 cohort earlier this year.
  • RepAir Carbon, an Israeli company with a fully electric, zero-heat carbon-removal technology that consumes minimal energy, operates without liquids or solvents, and produces no hazardous materials or waste.
  • RotorVault from Pasadena, California, is commercializing energy-storage and load-following solutions that are containerized, modular, and field-deployable systems built on flywheel technology.

Fourteen other companies will join Greentown Boston's incubator. See the full list here.

PLASENE and five other new members—Thola, Respire Energy, Andros Innovations, FAST Metals and Tato Labs—join Greentown Labs through its most recent Advancing Climatetech and Clean Energy Leaders Program, or ACCEL, cohort. ACCEL, which works to advance BIPOC-led startups in the climatetech space, announced its third cohort last month.

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A version of this story originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.

Houston startup unveils its innovative leather alternative at the rodeo

sustainable fashion

Last month’s Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo stirred up another rootin’ tootin’ time for Houstonians and beyond.

But before the annual event galloped into the sunset, there were quite a few memorable innovations on display, with one notably coming from Rheom Materials.

The Houston-based pioneer of next-generation materials presented its scalable, bio-based alternative known as Shorai, a 93 percent bio-based leather, through two custom, western-inspired outfits that showed off cowboy flair through a sustainable lens.

“I'm a Houstonian, I love the rodeo,” Megan Beck, Rheom’s business development manager, recalls. “We're sitting there talking about it one day and we're like, ‘Okay, we've got to do something with this leather to show people how good it can look in apparel, how easy it is to wear.’”

Buoyed by the idea that their materials are meant to “change your impact, not your life,” Rheom captured the real-life energy of their bio-leather outfits under the rodeo’s neon lights in a short commercial video and photo shoot with models donning the samples, while dancing and enjoying the festivities. Rheom created a skirt, a leather jacket, and then a leather top for the look.

“Houston is such a vibrant city,” Beck says. “There's so much innovation here. I think the rodeo is just a really, really great example of that. And so we wanted to take this opportunity to take some of these garments out there and go on the slide, go on some of the rides, go into the wine garden and go dancing, because if you've ever felt some of the materials in the market in this space, they're very stiff, you can't really move in them, they're a little fragile, they kind of fall apart.”

Not only do the models in the video look fashionable, but they also look comfortable, and the leather looks natural and supple. And to the naked eye, Shorai appears to be like the leather most wearers are accustomed to.

“What we really wanted to showcase in this is the energy and the movement of the leather, and to show people how good it can look in apparel, and how easy it is to wear, which I think we were able to accomplish,” Beck says.

Next up, Beck says Rheom wants to scale production of Shorai, the Japanese word for “future,” at a competitive price point, while also reducing its carbon footprint by 80 percent when compared to synthetic leather. According to Beck, Rheom plans to see Shorai products come to market sometime this year.

“We have companies globally right now that are testing materials, that are prototyping, that are making garments, making handbags and footwear, and making eyewear because we have a plastic, as well,” Beck says. “So, this year, I do believe we'll start seeing those products actually come to market, which is very, very exciting for us.”

And with their large-scale production partner already set up for Shorai, Rheom plans to start its first production run of the product soon.

“In April, we'll actually be starting our first production run,” Beck says. “We'll be doing it at full scale, full width, and a full run of materials. So over the next five years, we're only going to just try to increase that capacity.”

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