Houston startup founder is reinventing medical devices by thinking outside the pillbox

What's Poppin'

Regina Vatterott is thinking outside the traditional pillbox. Courtesy of Regina Vatterott

One day in college on her way to lunch with some friends, Regina Vatterott fainted on the sidewalk. It wasn't anything serious, but she had a few vitamin deficiencies and hadn't eaten in a while. After that, she started taking her daily supplements more seriously.

She tried using the traditional pillbox, but it would take her forever to organize. And she hated how her friends would call it, in a loving, playful way, her "old people pillbox."

She joined forces with a few like-minded individuals at her school to create a health and wellness accessory, rather than a medical device. They bought craft supplies and hand-glued LED lights to the first prototype of what would become EllieGrid, a smart pillbox that syncs with an app on your phone so that you can easily program your medicinal schedule and receive alerts of when to take what.


EllieGrid is a smart pillbox that syncs with your phone.Courtesy of Regina Vatterott

Vatterott, who was interning at a company that did social media marketing for independent pharmacies nationwide, saw an underserved market of adults who have a need for a product like this. EllieGrid targets the Baby Boomer age and younger, usually between ages 35 and 55.

Now, EllieGrid is growing from its initial presale phase to setting a system in place where Houstonians can find EllieGrid in stores or online.

InnovationMap: You and your team were only college students when you started. How did you get funding?

Regina Vatterott: We started pitching business plan competitions all over the country — even as far as Barcelona. We raised money — and some of it wasn't even money, but resources, like access to 3D printers or free office space. It was an amazing tool for us, and it helped validate us and helped us perfect our business plan. We ended up raising like $200,000 just in business plan competitions.

After that, we knew we had to prove it in market. Last year, we ran a crowdfunding campaign on IndieGoGo. Our goal was to raise $40,000, and we raised around $167,000. In January of this year, we shipped all the products that were preordered on IndieGoGo to 37 different countries.

IM: What's been the biggest challenge?

RV: The very beginning, the challenge was affording our legal fees — it's not something you want to skimp on, but was incredibly expensive. After that, it was simply manufacturing. It's never easy. It's always going to cost three times as much and take three times as long as you expect. With our plastics, we use a process called injection molding, and if the temperature is off, the plastics will dry in a different way and the pieces won't fit together. It's an obnoxious challenge that we're still facing today.

IM: What's next for you or your company?

RV: Right now, we are making that transition from pre-selling products to just regular sales. It's easier said than done because we are making sure that supply chain is efficient and on time. We are finishing up a batch of 1,000 units to work with that we'll just sell on our website. Once we have information on how we can sell these units, we want to work with distributors, so we are working on creating those relationships now.

IM: How has being headquartered in Houston been?

RV: This is a very affordable place and has a lot of resources for startups. I will say our one struggle is there's not a lot of funding for hardware startups — especially for consumers — like ours. That's more in California or New York.

IM: Thinking more long term, what do you have in mind for EllieGrid and your team?

RV: For EllieGrid, we want to implement artificial intelligence. We want to be able to take the data of how the user is interacting with the device and be able to predict when people will forget to take their meds to prevent any issues with medication.

For us, Ellie is just the start. We want to develop more health and wellness accessories that are traditionally known to be medical devices. One example we give is how eyeglasses used to be medical devices, and now glasses are a fashion accessory. We want to do more and more with medical devices because we think that people are always people before they are patients.

IM: What's the worst piece of advice you've received?

RV: In the beginning when we'd pitch this idea to doctors, they would tell us we were wasting our time because patients don't care what a product looks like as long as it works. I don't really get that anymore, because we're proving that wrong now.

The product is available online on the EllieGrid website, and the app is available for download. Courtesy of Regina Vatterott

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Portions of this interview have been edited.

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UH secures $5M in philanthropic gifts to bolster engineering, nursing

major gifts

The University of Houston has received two significant philanthropic gifts to advance innovation and healthcare, the college announced this month.

Manmohan Singh Kalsi and Marie-Luise Schubert Kalsi granted $4 million to UH’s Cullen College of Engineering to support endowed and current funds for graduate fellowships and industry interest in the mechanical and aerospace fields.

The gift is the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering’s largest donation in years, according to UH, and will establish two endowed professorships to attract and retain leading faculty. It will also create the Kalsi Faculty Research Fund, which aims to take emerging research to the next level.

Additionally, UH says it will also bring industry experts to campus to present and collaborate with students via the forthcoming Kalsi Seminar Series.

Manmohan Kalsi earned both his master’s degree and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from UH. He went on to found Sugar Land-based Kalsi Engineering in 1978, which pioneered hydrodynamic rotary sealing technology and valve technology for nuclear power plants. In 2014, he established an endowed professorship within Cullen College in honor of the late UH professor Gabriel Fazekas.

"This gift provides a tremendous boost to our department's strategic momentum,” Karolos Grigoriadis, chair of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, said in a news release. “By simultaneously supporting faculty, graduate researchers and collaborative seminars, the Kalsis are strengthening every part of our research enterprise and creating new opportunities for discovery, collaboration and student mentorship.”

Meanwhile, Houston’s The Hamill Foundation also gave a $1 million gift to UH’s Andy and Barbara Gessner College of Nursing. The funds will establish The Hamill Foundation Endowed Professorship in Community Care Nursing, to support a faculty member focused on community-based nursing education, partnerships, research, and outreach to underserved communities in Houston.

Additionally, the funding will go toward efforts to address nurse shortages through the newly established UH Health program. The Hamill Foundation has donated $6 million previously to UH through the years, but the latest $1 million is the largest single investment from the foundation to date.

“The Hamill Foundation continues to help us raise the bar for nursing education and address the nursing shortage,” Kathryn Tart, founding dean and professor at Gessner College and Humana Endowed Dean's Chair in Nursing, said in a news release. “The enduring commitment and generosity of The Hamill Foundation allow us to answer the call and educate generations of competent and caring nursing professionals.”

Both of the recent gifts help fund UH’s $1 billion Can’t Stop Houston: The Centennial Campaign. As of September, the university had raised more than $881 million. UH turns 100 years old in March 2027.

SpaceX's supersized Starship rocket launches into orbit for first time

Out in Space

SpaceX launched its enormous Starship into orbit for the first time Monday, September 28, and successfully delivered the most advanced Starlink satellites yet, but cut the flight short to ensure safety.

The spacecraft reentered over the Pacific and splashed down north of Hawaii three hours after blasting off from Texas. The company had been aiming for a 10-hour flight, spanning six full laps around Earth, to prove its readiness for NASA’s Artemis moon program.

Starship tipped over and erupted in flames upon splashdown, a dramatic end to the mission.

Elon Musk's Starship almost didn't make it to orbit when one of its engines shut down prematurely. But with everything else working well and the bad engine no longer needed, flight controllers decided, after several tense minutes, to proceed as planned.

“Starship is orbital,” Mission Control announced to cheers.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman congratulated SpaceX on reaching orbit and “managing every step in a safe, responsible and especially inspirational way.”

Rocket carries 26 of Musk's most advanced Starlink satellites

Musk’s showpiece rocket — the biggest and most powerful ever built — carried 26 of the latest Starlinks to join the 11,000 older models already providing internet service. They popped out of the spacecraft one by one, drawing more cheers from the SpaceX crowd at the Starbase launch site.

The decision to end the flight early came soon afterward. SpaceX said hours later in an online update that the decision was made “out of an abundance of caution” because of the early engine trouble.

It was Starship’s 14th full-scale launch from Texas’ southern tip in three years. Earlier test flights ventured no farther than the Indian Ocean halfway around the world, often crashing in flames and briefly skimming space.

This time, the intent was for SpaceX to circle the globe from an altitude of 170 miles (275 kilometers) — not just once but six times over almost 10 hours, ending with a Pacific splashdown near Chile. While Starship achieved the proper orbit, zipping along at 17,500 mph (28,000 kph), flight controllers opted to play it safe and bring it back several hours sooner, after just a couple of laps.

The first-stage booster was never meant to return to the Starbase launch site either, dropping instead into the Gulf of Mexico within minutes of the morning liftoff.

SpaceX wants to ensure that everything works before flying Starship back to Starbase. If the spacecraft breaks apart over land and rains debris onto people, “our popularity would diminish very rapidly,” Musk said at a business summit earlier this month. “That’s why we’re being extremely cautious here.”

Depending on the findings from Monday's orbital debut, the next Starship could return to the launch pad, where giant mechanical arms would grab the hovering spacecraft. If the catch works — Musk gives it even or slightly better odds — then SpaceX will refly the spacecraft by year’s end or early next year.

The 407-foot (124-meter) rocket was designed from the start to be fully reusable, a key to lowering launch costs. SpaceX managed to salvage the last Starship from the Indian Ocean in July. Engineers modified the newly launched Starship’s heat shield based on hands-on inspections of the recovered spacecraft, which is being tugged back to Starbase.

SpaceX wants Starship to be certified for orbital flight

SpaceX is pressing hard to certify Starship for orbital flight, a vital step toward moon and Mars travel.

NASA’s Artemis III mission is coming up as soon as next summer, a triple-launch docking exercise in orbit around Earth between an Orion capsule full of astronauts and competing lunar landers. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Moon would blast off first, followed by Orion — which would close in for a linkup — and then Musk’s Starship for a docking with Orion once Blue Moon is unleashed.

The next mission, Artemis IV, is slated for no sooner than 2028 and would have astronauts landing on the moon in either Blue Moon or Starship, whichever is ready first. Subsequent moonshots will alternate between the two billionaires’ landers.

Musk originally developed Starship for Mars, intending to launch scores of them with the red planet’s first settlers. For now, he plans to focus on the moon and use Starship to haul satellites into orbit by the truckload, phasing out the company’s frailer Falcon 9 rocket within several years. A second Starship launch site is nearing completion at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center and a third is planned for Louisiana.

Houston startup raises $2.4M for sleep apnea technology

sleep score

Houston-based Bairitone Health has closed an oversubscribed seed round and achieved a regulatory milestone, the company tells InnovationMap.

The healthtech startup, which is developing solutions and technology for untreated obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), raised $2.4 million, says CEO and co-founder Meagan Pitcher, exceeding its $2 million goal.

New York-based Golden Seeds, which invests in female entrepreneurs, led the round. Houston-based South Loop Ventures also participated, as well as MALIAM, Impact Invest Her and additional angel, venture, syndicate and family office investors. The company previously raised a pre-seed round of $435,000 in 2024.

Pitcher says the latest funding will go toward Bairitone's clinical site expansion, FDA-facing work and the continued product development of its SOMNAR technology.

"What I’m most excited about is what this lets us do next: expand our clinical testing, work with more patients and physicians, and keep improving based on what we learn," Pitcher said in a LinkedIn post.

SOMNAR is the company's noninvasive diagnostic platform for sleep apnea airway assessment. The platform maps users' anatomy during natural sleep using a facial patch to determine the root cause of airway obstruction. It then offers effective therapies for each patient.

SOMNAR received Breakthrough Device Designation from the Food and Drug Administration in April. It is currently for investigational use only and is still pending FDA clearance. The new designation aims to help speed up development, assessment and review for premarket approval for medical devices, according to the FDA. It will also give Bairitone more opportunities to interact directly with FDA experts to make the approval process more efficient.

Bairitone was founded in 2022 in the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign program by Pitcher, CTO Onur Kilic and chief medical officer Britt Cross. It was a member of Activate Houston's inaugural cohort and has participated in numerous accelerators and incubators.

The company was a finalist for the Houston Innovation Awards in 2025 and 2024.

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