Activate's application is live from now through October 23, and all founders of early-stage, research-backed hardtech companies in Houston are encouraged to apply. Photo via Getty Images

Applications are officially open for a Activate's second Houston cohort.

Activate's application is live from now through October 23, and all founders of early-stage, research-backed hardtech companies in Houston are encouraged to apply. The Berkley, California-based program launched in Houston last year and recently named its inaugural Houston cohort.

“The Activate Fellowship provides an opportunity for approximately 50 scientists and engineers annually to transform into entrepreneurial leaders, derisk their technologies, define first markets, build teams, and secure follow-on funding,” says Activate’s executive managing director, Aimee Rose, in a news release. “With an average 30 percent annual growth in applications since 2015, we know there is high demand for what we do, and we’re excited to see the talent and impactful ideas that come through the pipeline this year.

The program, led locally by Houston Managing Director Jeremy Pitts, has 249 current Activate fellows and alumni that have collectively raised over $2.4 billion in public and private funding since the organization was founded in 2015.

“The success of Activate Fellows is ample evidence that scientists and engineers have the talent and drive to face global challenges head-on,” adds Activate chief fellowship officer, Brenna Teigler. “Our diverse fellows are transforming technical breakthroughs into businesses across the United States in 26 states across a range of sectors spanning carbon management, semiconductors, manufacturing, energy, chemicals, ocean tech, and more.”

The application is available online, and fellows will be selected in April of next year. The 2025 program will begin in June.

Activate is looking for local and regional early-stage founders — who have raised less than $2 million in funding — who are working on high-impact technology. Each cohort consists of 10 fellows that join the program for two years. The fellows receive a living stipend, connections from Activate's robust network of mentors, and access to a curriculum specific to the program.

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This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

So many Newstonians are coming in from California. Photo courtesy of TxDOT

Houston leads Texas in most Californians relocating from this county, says new study

GOLDEN STATE TO LONE STAR STATE

The Hollywood-to-Houston population pipeline is overflowing, a new study suggests.

Harris County ranks as the No. 1 destination for people relocating to Texas from California, according to a StorageCafé data analysis. The No. 1 place of origin? Los Angeles County, home to Hollywood.

Among California counties, Harris County attracted the most new arrivals from Los Angeles County in 2019 (3,263), followed by San Diego County (840), and Riverside County (698).

Why are Californians swapping the West Coast for the Gulf Coast? A prime reason appears to be housing costs. The analysis shows the median price difference in 2020 between a home in Los Angeles County and a home in Harris County was $482,010. And even though they're paying less for a home in Harris County, L.A. transplants are gaining a median 577 square feet in additional space.

"When housing prices in California go up, so does migration to Texas. When housing prices in California go down, migration to Texas goes down as well," William Fulton, director of Rice University's Kinder Institute for Urban Research, tells StorageCafé, a self-storage platform.

Looking at the California-to-Texas connection, Los Angeles County holds the top seven spots in the ranking of counties that send the most new residents to our state. Here are the top seven:

  1. Los Angeles County to Harris County (3,263 new residents in 2019).
  2. Los Angeles County to Dallas County (2,492 new residents in 2019).
  3. Los Angeles County to Travis County (2,060 new residents in 2019).
  4. Los Angeles County to Collin County (1,609 new residents in 2019).
  5. Los Angeles County to Tarrant County (1,374 new residents in 2019).
  6. Los Angeles County to Bexar County (1,366 new residents in 2019).
  7. Los Angeles County to Denton County (1,290 new residents in 2019).

"Elon Musk is well on his way to being the first human on Mars, but he's far from being a pioneer when it comes to moving to Texas. His recent move to the state is just one among the almost 190 daily moves from California to Texas that occurred from 2010 to 2019," StorageCafé says.

Here are the top 10 counties for new arrivals from all California counties in 2019:

  1. Harris County — 8,408.
  2. Dallas County — 7,923.
  3. Travis County — 6,725.
  4. Tarrant County — 6,623.
  5. Bexar County — 5,340.
  6. Collin County — 5,294.
  7. Denton County — 4,028.
  8. Williamson County — 2,877.
  9. El Paso County — 2,521.
  10. Bell County — 1,727.
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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

When it comes to maintaining a good ecosystem, diversity is key. Houston learned that the hard way. Photo by Tim Leviston/Getty Images

Here's what the Bay Area can learn from Houston

Take note

Hello Bay Area! We Houstonians are concerned about you.

We think your economy is becoming overly dependent on Silicon Valley. In 2018, the technology industry accounted for around 62 percent of all office leasing activity in San Francisco. From September 2017 to September 2018, tech companies and realty investors bought $1.43 billion worth of San Jose downtown properties, nearly three times what they spent the year before on property in the city.

Some of your biggest search, social media, and database companies are expanding their headquarters in San Jose, San Francisco, and the rest of Silicon Valley. This is causing the construction industry to become more dependent on tech. But it's not just the construction industry that is becoming attached at the hip with Silicon Valley. According to the Bay Area Council, for every one high tech job created in the U.S., four more are created in industries as varied as education, law, dentistry, retail, and food. That means a lot of jobs in the Bay Area are, and are going to be, dependent on Silicon Valley.

Meanwhile, the Bay Area's high cost of living is pushing low and middle-income people further and further away from the state to places like Colorado, New York, and Texas (thanks for that by the way). The Bay Area had the highest income disparity between those migrating into the area and those leaving it than any major metro area in the country between 2010 and 2016. An economy can't last with just high-salaried tech workers.

We here in Houston have seen what happens when a metropolitan area becomes overly dependent on its dominant industry.

The 1980s were a tough time in Houston's history due to the huge fall in oil prices. In 1986, crude oil prices fell 52 percent to about $27 a barrel in today's dollars. The majority of Houston's economy was centered around the oil business at that time. The industries that were not directly related to energy, such as restaurants, car dealerships, and real estate were in a symbiotic relationship and were in some cases catastrophically hurt. When the oil industry took a hit, the entire economy took a hit. During this time, Houstonians lost 225,000 jobs, or one in eight jobs in the city.

Many young workers in petroleum engineering, geophysics, and other energy positions were laid off, many leaving the industry altogether. Older workers retired. In the mid-2000s, when the shale drilling revolution began, the needed manpower was just not there to meet the demand and it was expensive to hire and train a new workforce.

We were able to recover. Some 175,000 Houstonians are now working in oil production, oil field services, materials, and fabricated metals, and tens of thousands more are working as suppliers and contractors. We're more ethnically and industrially diverse than we ever were before, but it took time.

What did we learn from the 1980s?

First, diversify.

While we still have a vibrant oil and gas business in Houston, we've also expanded further into our other core industries: health care, technology and space. The Bay Area is fortunate in that it has strong banking, agriculture, and tourism industries. It ought to be putting more TLC into these industries or expanding into other fields.

We learned not to keep all of our wealth in the oil and gas companies in which we work. It's far too common for Silicon Valley workers to have too much trust in the companies they work for, hoping that their stock options will propel them to riches one day. As we learned in Houston, this can lead to disastrous results. Diversify your portfolios, but be careful. Houstonians over invested in real estate in the 1980s and miscalculated the future of that industry.

Second, Houston has also learned to keep well-educated professionals trained and capable of finding support for those in between jobs. Luckily this doesn't seem to be a problem for the Bay Area. While the Greater Houston Region keeps roughly 66.1 percent of its four-year college graduates in the area, the Bay Area keeps 65.2 percent of its graduates around. So, Bay Area, never take your universities, like U.C. Berkeley and Stanford, for granted.

We know the Bay Area has seen its own troubles before. The dotcom bust of the early 2000s was devastating to the local economy. We're just especially sensitive to what happened to us in 1980s and we'd hate to see the Bay Area go through something similar again.

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Elizabeth Biar is vice president of Strategic Public Affairs, a government elations and PR/communications firm based in Houston. Sam Felsing is a former reporter and who currently works as a senior account executive at Telegraph, a political consulting and public relations firm based in Oakland, California.

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Axiom Space taps solar array developer for first space station module

space contract

Houston-based Axiom Space is making progress on developing its commercial space station.

The company awarded Florida-based Redwire Corporation a contract to develop and deliver roll-out solar array (ROSA) wings to power the Axiom Payload Power Thermal Module (AxPPTM), which will be the first module for the new space station.

AxPPTM will initially attach to the International Space Station. AxPPTM will later separate from the ISS and rendezvous with Axiom’s Habitat 1 (AxH1) on orbit. Eventually, an airlock, Habitat 2 (AxH2) and finally the Research and Manufacturing Facility (AxRMF) will be added to the first two Axiom modules.

AxPPTM is anticipated to launch toward the end of 2027. The two-module station (AxPPTM and AxH1) is expected to be operational as a free-flying station by 2028, and the full four-module station around 2030.

The modules will be integrated and assembled at Axiom Space’s Assembly and Integration facility, making them the first human-rated spacecraft built in Houston.

Redwire’s ROSA technology was originally developed for the ISS, according to Space News. It has yielded a 100 percent success rate on on-orbit performance. The technology has also been used on NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission, the Maxar-built Power and Propulsion Element for the Artemis Lunar Gateway and Thales Alenia Space’s Space Inspire satellites.

“As a market leader for space power solutions, Redwire is proud to be selected as a strategic supplier to deliver ROSAs for Axiom Space’s first space station module,” Mike Gold, Redwire president of civil and international space, said in a news release. “As NASA and industry take the next steps to build out commercial space stations to maintain U.S. leadership in low-Earth orbit, Redwire continues to be the partner of choice, enabling critical capabilities to ensure on-orbit success.”

Greentown Houston to add new AI lab for energy startups

AI partnership

Greentown Labs has partnered with Shoreless to launch an AI lab within its Houston climatetech incubator.

"Climatetech and energy startups are transforming industries, and AI is a critical tool in that journey," Lawson Gow, Greentown's Head of Houston, said in a news release. "We're excited to bring this new offering to our entrepreneurs and corporate partners to enhance the way they think about reducing costs and emissions across the value chain."

Shoreless, a Houston-based company that enables AI adoption for enterprise systems, will support startups developing solutions for supply-chain optimization and decarbonization. They will offer Greentown members climate sprint sessions that will deliver AI-driven insights to assist companies in reducing Scope 3 emissions, driving new revenue streams and lowering expenses. Additionally, the lab will help companies test their ideas before attempting to scale them globally.

"The future of climatetech is intertwined with the future of AI," Ken Myers, Founder and CEO of Shoreless, said in a news release. "By launching this AI lab with Greentown Labs, we are creating a collaborative ecosystem where innovation can flourish. Our agentic AI is designed to help companies make a real difference, and we are excited to see the groundbreaking solutions that will emerge from this partnership."

Greentown and Shoreless will collaborate on workshops that address industry needs for technical teams, and Shoreless will also work to provide engagement opportunities and tailored workshops for Greentown’s startups and residents. Interested companies can inquire here.

Recently, Greentown Labs also partnered with Los Angeles-based software development firm Nominal to launch the new Industrial Center of Excellence at Greentown's Houston incubator. It also announced a partnership with Houston-based EnergyTech Nexus, which will also open an investor lounge on-site last month. Read more here.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Houston medical institutions launch $6M kidney research incubator

NIH funding

Institutions within Houston’s Texas Medical Center have launched the Houston Area Incubator for Kidney, Urologic and Hematologic Research Training (HAI-KUH) program. The incubator will be backed by $6.25 million over five years from the National Institutes of Health and aims to create a training pipeline for researchers.

HAI-KUH will include 58 investigators from Baylor College of Medicine, Texas Children’s Hospital, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, University of Houston, Houston Methodist Research Institute, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Rice University and Texas A&M University Institute of Biosciences and Technology. The program will fund six predoctoral students and six postdoctoral associates. Trainees will receive support in scientific research, professional development and networking.

According to the organizations, Houston has a high burden of kidney diseases, hypertension, sickle cell disease and other nonmalignant hematologic conditions. HAI-KUH will work to improve the health of patients by building a strong scientific workforce that leverages the team's biomedical research resources to develop research skills of students and trainees and prepare them for sustained and impactful careers. The funding comes through the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.

The principal investigators of the project include Dr. Alison Bertuch, professor of pediatric oncology and molecular and human genetics at BCM; Peter Doris, professor and director of the Institute of Molecular Medicine Center for Human Genetics at UT Health; and Margaret Goodell, professor and chair of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Baylor.

“This new award provides unique collaborative training experiences that extend beyond the outstanding kidney, urology, and hematology research going on in the Texas Medical Center,” Doris said in a news release. “In conceiving this award, the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases envisioned trainee development across the full spectrum of skills required for professional success.”

Jeffrey Rimer, a professor of Chemical Engineering, is a core investigator on the project and program director at UH. Rimer is known for his breakthroughs in using innovative methods in control crystals to help treat malaria and kidney stones. Other co-investigators include Dr. Wolfgang Winkelmeyer (Baylor), Oleh Pochynyuk (UTHealth), Dr. Rose Khavari (Houston Methodist) and Pamela Wenzel (UT Health).

“This new NIH-sponsored training program will enable us to recruit talented students and postdocs to work on these challenging areas of research,” Rimer added in a release.