These are the 3 downtown Houston coworking concepts expecting to deliver by end of 2020

Digesting downtown

Downtown Houston has over 100,000-square-feet of new coworking space expected to open by the end of 2020. Shobeir Ansari/Getty Images

Recently, Houston got a "needs improvement" on its coworking space report card — but the tide is changing as more and more coworking spaces plan to open in town — especially in the downtown sector.

Houston's current coworking space volume ranked it No. 15, according to a report from Colliers International, which fell behind Dallas and Austin. However, Houston has many future projects due to deliver in the next 18 months or so — including over 100,000 square feet of space in downtown alone.

Downtown has a slew of features that's made it attractive to coworking companies — public transportation, various retail and restaurant concepts, green spaces — but commercial real estate has typically been reserved for major corporations who can afford it, says Robert Pieroni, Central Houston's director of economic development.

"There's been a lot of new opportunities for companies — startups and companies who previously couldn't afford to be in the downtown market — to now be in the downtown market," Pieroni tells InnovationMap. "So, we've seen an influx of smaller companies particularly in the tech sector."

However, it's those major corporations sprinkled around downtown that have made Houston so attractive to startups and accelerators, Pieroni says, and these major corporations are willing to connect with entrepreneurs and startups.

"There's no difference on paper in our talent and the innovation hubs around the world," Pieroni says. "The one thing we have to offer startups that other places don't have to offer in Texas is we have the largest corporate presence in the state of Texas here in Houston."

The new coworking options are slowly changing the way commercial brokers approach leases for startups. Traditionally, brokers are wary of short-term leases.

"It's not because [the startups] are afraid they are going to go out of business," Pieroni says. "They're afraid that they are going to grow at such a rapid pace."

Two new-to-Houston tech companies opened offices in downtown Houston just this year. Oil and gas AI-enabled analytics platform, Ruths.ai, and global robotics company UiPath, which has a presence in 18 countries, moved into the Main&Co at 114 Main. And, Pieroni says, Central Houston expects more to come in that arena.

"We're having conversations daily with multiple companies that are evaluating coming to downtown Houston," he says.

Here's a breakdown of the three coworking spaces expecting to deliver in downtown Houston over the next 18 months.

Spaces brings second largest coworking space in downtown

Spaces, an Amsterdam-based coworking space company that entered the Houston market with a lease in Kirby Grove announced in 2017, has two more Spaces locations planned for end of 2019. Courtesy of Midway

Size: 63,000 square feet of workspace in repurposed retail space.

Estimated timeline: Opening later in 2019

Special features: Open space, smaller team rooms, private offices, phone booths, and a 3,000-square foot rooftop patio.

Other locations: Amsterdam-based Spaces has 3,300 flexible workspace locations across the world — another in Houston's Kirby Grove and one coming to Two Post Oak Central.

Overheard: "Spaces fits perfectly in GreenStreet, a mixed-use district that is being redeveloped as the new model of urban lifestyle," says Chris Seckinger, vice president and investment manager for Midway, in a release.

Life Time Work announces second Houston location

GreenStreet will soon have coworking space and a gym from Life Time. Courtesy of Midway Cos.

Square footage: 38,000 square feet of coworking space (additional 56,000 square feet of wellness space adjacent)

Estimated timeline: Opening in 2020.

Special features: Private offices, reserved desk, events, coffee, as well as other services.

Other locations: Last year, Minnesota-based Life Time Inc. opened its first location of Life Time Work in Pennsylvania as well as announced its second location headed to Houston's CIty Centre, which is expected to open later this year.

Overheard: "GreenStreet aligns well with our vision to meet the changing needs of consumers by bringing Life Time — through our athletic destinations and coworking space — as a lifestyle asset to bustling and successful developments," says Parham Javaheri, Minnesota-based Life Time's executive vice president of real estate and development, in a release. "We look forward to becoming an anchor to this new model of urban living in 2020."

Brookfield Properties' Houston Center renovation

Brookfield Properties is currently renovating Houston Center. One of the new amenities will be coworking space. Courtesy of Brookfield

Square footage: The total project is projected to be 4 million square feet, but it's unclear how much of that will be for the coworking aspect.

Estimated timeline: Construction should be concluded by late 2020.

Special features: A new central plaza and greenspace, a digital water wall, entertainment space, an iconic stair connection to new landscaped terraces, two-story glass façade, reclad skybridges, a new 10,000-SF fitness center, new dining and retail.

Other locations: Currently, Brookfield doesn't have any other coworking locations in Houston.

Overheard: "Brookfield continues to look to the future by transforming another of their Downtown properties into an amenity-rich development. This progressive, strategic shift accommodates the blurred lines of today's live-work-play corporate culture that tenants desire," says Bob Eury, Downtown District president, in a release. "In addition, the re-imagining of Houston Center and McKinney Street will add to Downtown's list of attractions creating a bustling linear space lined with restaurants, nightlife, parks and landscaping, connecting Main Street to Discovery Green and Avenida Houston."


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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.

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