Houston innovators recognized at annual regional entrepreneur competition

Meet the winners

The 11 executives now will move on to national Entrepreneur Of The Year program. National winners will be named in November. Photos courtesy

Eleven Houston-based executives have been crowned regional winners in the Entrepreneur Of The Year program, run by professional services firm EY.

The 11 executives now will move on to national Entrepreneur Of The Year program. National winners will be named in November.

“Every year, we are completely blown away by the accomplishments of our Entrepreneur Of The Year Regional Award winners, and 2023 is no different,” AJ Jordan, director of the Entrepreneur Of The Year program for EY Americas, says in a news release. “They are change-makers and champions of business and community, and we are so proud to be honoring them. We can’t wait to see how these leaders will continue to improve lives and disrupt industries.”

Here are the 11 local winners from the program’s Gulf South region.

Steve Altemus, president and CEO of Intuitive Machines

Intuitive Machines, founded in 2013, is a publicly traded space exploration company. The company’s upcoming mission will send the first U.S. spacecraft to the moon since 1972 as well as the first-ever commercial lunar lander. Its Nova-C spacecraft will carry commercial and NASA payloads.

Earlier this year, a joint venture led by Intuitive Machines nabbed a contract valued at up to $719 million for work on NASA’s Joint Polar Satellite System. The company, which went public in February 2023, forecasts revenue of $174 million to $268 million this year.

“Steve’s visionary mindset and ability to assemble and inspire a talented team have been instrumental in our collective success,” the company says in a statement about the Entrepreneur Of The Year award. “He consistently fosters a culture of excellence, empowering our diverse group of engineers, scientists, and visionaries to pioneer groundbreaking solutions and deliver outstanding results.”

Gaurab Chakrabarti, co-founder and CEO of Solugen, and Sean Hunt, co-founder and CTO

Solugen, founded in 2016, makes and distributes specialty chemicals derived from feedstock. The startup is reportedly valued at more than $2 billion. To date, Solugen has raised $642.2 million, according to Crunchbase.

In naming Solugen one of the most innovative companies of 2022, Fast Company noted that the carbon-negative process embraced by Solugen and the startup’s “ability to sell flexible amounts of chemicals to companies looking to lower their own footprint have helped the company make inroads in a traditionally slow-moving industry.”

Daryl Dudum and Matthew Hadda, founders and co-CEOs of Specialty1 Partners

Specialty1 Partners, which launched in 2019, supplies business services to dental surgery practices. These services include HR, recruiting, payroll, accounting, operations, marketing, business development, compliance, IT, and legal.

In 2022, Specialty1 Partners appeared at No. 72 on the Inc. 5000 list with two-year revenue growth of 2,921 percent.

“Supporting our partners and helping them grow while continuing to build partnerships with industry-leading, innovative surgical specialists is what we focus on every day,” Dudum says in a 2022 news release. “It’s not just about growing our network — we are committed to helping our partner practices grow and succeed on their terms.”

Ludmila Golovine, president and CEO of MasterWord Services

MasterWord Services offers translation and interpretation in more than 400 languages for customers such as energy, health care, and tech companies. The woman-owned business was founded in 1993.

“I’m grateful to our exceptional team and to each of our translators and interpreters who every day live our mission of connecting people across language and culture,” Golovine says in a news release about the Entrepreneur Of The Year honor.

Roger Jenkins, president and CEO of Murphy Oil

Murphy Oil is involved in oil and natural gas exploration and production primarily onshore in the U.S. and Canada, and offshore along the Gulf of Mexico. The publicly traded Fortune 1000 company, founded in 1944, racked up revenue of nearly $4 billion in 2022.

“Over the years, the company has grown and evolved to become a leading independent energy company, with strategic assets around the world,” Murphy says on its website. “All the while, we have remained true to our mission — to challenge the norm, tap into our strong legacy, and use our foresight and financial discipline to deliver inspired energy solutions.

Mohammad Millwala, founder and CEO of DM Clinical Research

DM Clinical Research, founded in 2006, runs 13 sites for clinical trials. Its areas of specialty include vaccines, internal medicine, pediatrics, gastrointestinal, psychiatry, and women’s health.

“DM Clinical Research is in a period of rapid growth with multiple new study sites added over the last two years in addition to the quadrupling of our staff to over 500 employees,” Millwala says in a January 2023 news release. “We expect this transformational growth trajectory to continue for the foreseeable future, on the road to becoming the leading independent clinical research network in the nation.”

Mark Walker, co-founder, chairman and CEO of Direct Digital Holdings, and Keith Smith, co-founder and president

Publicly traded Direct Digital Holdings owns three operating companies that offer online platforms for advertising. Three years after its founding in 2018, the company became the ninth Black-owned business to go public in the U.S.

The company posted revenue of $88 million in 2022, up 131 percent from the previous year.

“Direct Digital Holdings’ success is rooted in the hard work and commitment we have long seen in taking advantage of advertising opportunities targeting underserved communities and [that] markets often overlook,” Smith says in a news release about the Entrepreneur Of The Year award.

Omair Tariq, co-founder and CEO of Cart.com

While technically headquartered in Austin, Houston-funded Cart.com's co-founder and CEO, Omair Tariq, also was a Gulf South winner in the Entrepreneur Of The Year program.

The e-commerce company moved its headquarters from Houston to Austin in 2021. However, Tariq remains in Houston. In May 2023, Tariq delivered the commencement address to MBA recipients from Rice University’s Jones Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.

Cart.com, founded in 2020, offers software and services to thousands of online merchants. To date, the pre-IPO company has raised $421 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.

“We want to be the commerce-enablement infrastructure for the largest brands in the world,” Tariq told the Insider news website in 2022.

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Baylor, Rice win $500,000 to launch humanities-driven health AI center

ethical AI

Baylor College of Medicine and Rice University have been awarded a $500,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to create the Center for Humanities-based Health AI Innovation (CHHAIN).

The new center and three-year initiative aims to create ethically responsible and trustworthy AI for health care that uses history and patient narratives to shape the technology, according to a release. It represents a collaboration between the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy at Baylor and the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice. Ultimately, the researchers aim to establish a national model for integrating the humanities into the design and implementation of health AI.

Vasiliki Rahimzadeh, assistant professor at Baylor in the Center for Medical Ethics and Health Policy, and Kirsten Ostherr, director of the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice, will serve as co-directors of the new center, which will be housed within the Center for Medical Ethics.

The team will also engage in strategic collaborations with Kirstin Matthews, Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy and its fellow in science and technology policy, as well as Dr. Quianta Moore, executive director of the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute. An interdisciplinary team of medical humanities and bioethics scholars from Baylor, Rice, and partners in the Houston area will complete the group.

“CHHAIN represents a bold new model for integrating the humanities into health innovation,” Ostherr said in a news release. “It will create a collaborative space where humanities scholars, patients, developers and clinicians can come together to explore the human dimensions of health AI—trust, narrative and lived experience. These are essential perspectives that are too often missing from technology development, and CHHAIN is designed to change that."

CHHAIN’s work will revolve around three key points:

  • Defining trustworthy AI through patient voices
  • Translating humanities insights into clinical AI settings
  • Public engagement and policy translation

“For AI to truly improve health outcomes, it must be designed with patient trust and wellbeing at its core,” Rahimzadeh said in the news release. “CHHAIN will provide a dedicated space to explore critical bioethics questions, such as how we ensure AI respects patient autonomy, addresses the needs of underserved communities and integrates meaningfully into clinical care. Our goal is to translate these insights into real-world health settings where AI is already shaping patient experiences."

CHHAIN's research mission was also developed thanks to pilot funding from the Margaret M. and Albert B. Alkek Department of Medicine at Baylor and a grant from Rice's Provost's TMC Collaborator Fund.

Texas A&M, the University of North Texas and the University of Texas at El Paso were also home to some of the 97 projects that received a portion of the $34.79 million in fundning from the NEH. See the full list here.

Houston booms as No. 2 U.S. market for retail construction in 2025

Construction Zone

Get ready for a gigantic cartload of new shopping opportunities in Houston. A new report indicates the equivalent of 21 Walmart supercenters is under construction in the region.

The report, published by commercial real estate services provider Lee & Associates, says Houston has nearly 3.9 million square feet of retail space under construction, making it the second most active market for new retail space in the U.S.

To put that in perspective, given the average Walmart supercenter measures 182,000 square feet, the 3.9 million-square-foot total would work out to 21 new supercenters being built in the region.

Dallas-Fort Worth is by far the most active U.S. market for new retail space; DFW leads more than 60 U.S. retail markets with nearly 7.15 million square feet of space under construction. The amount of retail space going up in DFW represents 15 percent of all retail space under construction in the more than 60 U.S. markets tracked by Lee & Associates.

Houston and Austin aren’t too far behind Dallas-Fort Worth, though.

Third-ranked Austin area has more than 3.4 million square feet of retail space being built.

What’s behind the surge in retail construction across Texas? Population growth.

Data recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau shows Houston was the second-fastest-growing metro from 2023 to 2024. DFW was the country’s third-fastest-growing metro from 2023 to 2024, based on the number of new residents, and Austin landed at No. 13.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Intuitive Machines to acquire NASA-certified deep space navigation company

space deal

Houston-based space technology, infrastructure and services company Intuitive Machines has agreed to buy Tempe, Arizona-based aerospace company KinetX for an undisclosed amount.

The deal is expected to close by the end of this year, according to a release from the company.

KinetX specializes in deep space navigation, systems engineering, ground software and constellation mission design. It’s the only company certified by NASA for deep space navigation. KinetX’s navigation software has supported both of Intuitive Machines’ lunar missions.

Intuitive Machines says the acquisition marks its entry into the precision navigation and flight dynamics segment of deep space operations.

“We know our objective, becoming an indispensable infrastructure services layer for space exploration, and achieving it requires intelligent systems and exceptional talent,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said in the release. “Bringing KinetX in-house gives us both: flight-proven deep space navigation expertise and the proprietary software behind some of the most ambitious missions in the solar system.”

KinetX has supported deep space missions for more than 30 years, CEO Christopher Bryan said.

“Joining Intuitive Machines gives our team a broader operational canvas and shared commitment to precision, autonomy, and engineering excellence,” Bryan said in the release. “We’re excited to help shape the next generation of space infrastructure with a partner that understands the demands of real flight, and values the people and tools required to meet them.”

Intuitive Machines has been making headlines in recent weeks. The company announced July 30 that it had secured a $9.8 million Phase Two government contract for its orbital transfer vehicle. Also last month, the City of Houston agreed to add three acres of commercial space for Intuitive Machines at the Houston Spaceport at Ellington Airport. Read more here.

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