A new report on best markets for startup compensation — and more Houston innovation news. Photo via Getty Images

Houston's summer has been heating up in terms of innovation news, and there might be some headlines you may have missed.

In this roundup of short stories within Houston startups and tech, a Houston unicorn is reportedly opening a new facility, a data science organization names new CEO, and more.

Mercury Data Science names new CEO

Angela Holmes, former COO of Mercury Data Science, has been named the CEO. Photo courtesy of MDS

A Houston-based AI solutions consultancy has made changes to its C-suite. Dan Watkins is passing on the CEO baton to Angela Holmes, who has served on MDS's board and as COO. As Holmes moves into the top leadership position, Watkins will transition to chief strategy officer and maintain his role on the board of directors.

"Over the last three years, as COO and a member of the board of directors, Angela has been instrumental in MDS’s growth, especially in building MDS’s Strategy Consulting practice and UI/UX and Machine Learning Engineering capabilities," saus Watkins in a news release. "The magic at Mercury Data Science is all about the diverse team who have created a culture of excellence, trust and purpose with the goal of using AI/ML to solve some of the most important health and social problems facing the world today.

"Angela was instrumental in building our culture and customer base over the last three years and will do a great job taking the company to the next level," he continues.

Mercury Data Science was incubated and launched out of Houston-based VC firm Mercury Fund. MDS works with the Mercury portfolio companies as well other startups in the life sciences and health care space.

"It is an exciting time to lead Mercury Data Science as we advance the development of innovative data science platforms at the intersection of biology, behavior, and AI," says Holmes in the release. "I am particularly excited about the demand for our Ergo insights platform for life sciences, allowing scientists to aggregate a vast set of biomedical data to better inform decisions around drug development priorities.

"The increasing understanding of biology, accessibility of large data sets, and accelerating computational capabilities is creating a golden age of life science innovation," she adds. "We are committed to using our expertise to accelerate our clients’ advances in human health, nutrition, therapeutics, diagnostics, and behavior, to create profound advances for humanity."

Here's how Houston ranks in terms of startup compensation

This chart from Carta shows the four tiers of the US markets. Houston, in 15th place, leads the third tier. Image courtesy of Carta

A new report looked into compensation at startups across the country, and the Texas market fared pretty well overall. The report from Carta, a San Francisco, California-based technology company that specializes in capitalization table management and valuation software, factored in data using more than 127,000 employee records from startups that use Carta Total Comp, the premier compensation management platform for private companies.

"At Carta, we see it as our responsibility to share the insights that come from an unmatched amount of data about the private market," per the report. "That includes data on startup headcount, payroll and equity metrics, salary medians, and remote work."

The greater Houston area ranked No. 15 in the list, which lands it at the top of the third tier just ahead of Dallas. As the chart depicts, Houston has 88 percent of the compensation of the top market — which this year is a four-way tie between the San Francisco, New York, San Jose, and Seattle areas. Austin landed in the middle of the top tier, and San Antonio snuck into the bottom of the third tier. The full report with national trends is online.

Axiom to open in former electronics store space

Axiom Space will reportedly move engineering into a former retail space. Photo via Facebook

According to a Facebook post from Deer Park Economic Development, Houston unicorn startup Axiom Space has leased a 146,000-square-foot space in what used to be a Fry's Electronics store in Webster. Reportedly, the new facility will house its engineering operations.

"Axiom's initial plans for the building are to support 400 employees, all assigned to engineering work on the Axiom Station, including development across all of its subsystems," reads the post from July 6. "The buildout will be able to accommodate up to 540 people. Axiom plans a move in late July or early August."

Axiom hasn't put out an official news release on this particular facility, but in May the company broke ground on its headquarters at Ellington Airport, the site of the Houston Spaceport. That campus just down the street will house employee offices, astronaut training, and mission control facilities, engineering development and testing labs, and a high bay production facility to house Axiom’s space station modules under construction, according to Axiom.

TRISH awards three postdoctoral fellowships to further space health research

Three scientists were tapped for funding from this Houston organization. Photo via Pexels

Baylor College of Medicine's Translational Research Institute for Space Health — along with its partners California Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology — announced the new fellowship cohort of postdoctoral researchers supported by the TRISH Academy of Bioastronautics who will receive funding and resources for further career growth for two years.

“Cultivating the next generation of space health researchers is one of our strategic goals,” says Dr. Dorit Donoviel, TRISH executive director and associate professor in Baylor’s Center for Space Medicine, in a news release. “We aim to prepare a diverse workforce from a variety of scientific backgrounds to help us solve the challenges facing space explorers on future missions to the Moon and beyond. We are thrilled to welcome this next batch of postdocs as they help bring us closer to that goal.”

These fellows join a cohort of more than 20 previously supported TRISH postdoctoral researchers.

"My career was launched with a fellowship from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (NSBRI), the predecessor to TRISH, so I greatly appreciate the value of mentorship and community to those starting out in the field of space biomedical research,” says Dr. Jeffrey Willey, associate professor of radiation oncology at Wake Forest University School of Medicine, in the release.

This 2022 postdoctoral fellows and their research projects are:

  • Xu Cao —Identifying Genetic Factors in Radiation Injury with Pooled Single Cell Sequencing
  • Ashley Nemec-Bakk — The Use of Two New Ground-based Models of Deep Space Travel to Study the Role of Mitochondria and Oxidative Stress in Cardiovascular Effects
  • David Temple — Systematically Assessment of Noisy Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation as a Sensorimotor Countermeasure

Greentown Labs announces second carbon innovation cohort

Greentown Labs announced its latest carbon-focused cohort. Photo via GreentownLabs.com

The The Carbon to Value Initiative is a multi-year collaboration between the Urban Future Lab at NYU Tandon School of Engineering, Greentown Labs, and Fraunhofer USA, which is supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. In its second year, the carbontech accelerator program has selected eight startups in partnership with Fluor Corporation, the initiative’s Year Two Cohort Champion.

With almost 100 applicants from about 20 countries, the C2V Initiative named the following startups to the program, per a release from Greentown:

  • Aluminum Technologies (New Orleans, U.S.) has developed Carbo-Chloride Reduction (CCR) aluminum manufacturing technology, which captures process CO2 and also reduces power consumption relative to conventional methods.
  • Carbon Upcycling Technologies (Calgary, Canada) utilizes point-source CO2 and mineralizes it with waste materials to create supplementary cementitious materials (SCMs) that can be used in building materials.
  • Carbonova Corp (Calgary, Canada) utilizes CO2 and methane as a feedstock to produce carbon nanofibers (CNF) that may be used in various fields such as transportation and buildings.
  • ecoLocked (Berlin, Germany) converts waste biomass into biochar to create admixes that can replace a share of the cement used in concrete manufacturing, and thus sequester carbon within buildings.
  • Full Cycle Bioplastics (San Jose, U.S.) has a patented bacteria-based technology that converts organic waste into Polyhydroxyalkanoate (PHA), a biopolymer that can be used to replace a wide range of oil-based plastic applications.
  • Lydian (Somerville, U.S.) develops an electro-thermal reactor technology that converts captured CO2 into fuels and chemicals.
  • Molecule Works (Richland, U.S.) develops a solid sorbent Direct Air Capture (DAC) system using a novel reactor and contactor configuration.
  • Osmoses (Boston, U.S.) develops polymers for gas separation, enabling membrane-based carbon capture applications.

“If we are to succeed in reaching carbon neutrality, then carbontech must play a critical role,” says Ryan Dings, COO and general counsel of Greentown Labs. “For carbontech to do so, we must convene entrepreneurs, market leaders, investors, and policymakers deeply committed to rapidly creating a carbontech ecosystem, which is what our efforts with the C2V Initiative represent and why we’re so proud to be working with this incredible group of partners.”

While the program and its cohort companies aren't based in Houston, Greentown's local presence and member companies will play a role in the initiative.

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Oxy's $1.3B Texas carbon capture facility on track to​ launch this year

gearing up

Houston-based Occidental Petroleum is gearing up to start removing CO2 from the atmosphere at its $1.3 billion direct air capture (DAC) project in the Midland-Odessa area.

Vicki Hollub, president and CEO of Occidental, said during the company’s recent second-quarter earnings call that the Stratos project — being developed by carbon capture and sequestration subsidiary 1PointFive — is on track to begin capturing CO2 later this year.

“We are immensely proud of the achievements to date and the exceptional record of safety performance as we advance towards commercial startup,” Hollub said of Stratos.

Carbon dioxide captured by Stratos will be stored underground or be used for enhanced oil recovery.

Oxy says Stratos is the world’s largest DAC facility. It’s designed to pull 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from the air and either store it underground or use it for enhanced oil recovery. Enhanced oil recovery extracts oil from unproductive reservoirs.

Most of the carbon credits that’ll be generated by Stratos through 2030 have already been sold to organizations such as Airbus, AT&T, All Nippon Airways, Amazon, the Houston Astros, the Houston Texans, JPMorgan, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and TD Bank.

The infrastructure business of investment manager BlackRock has pumped $550 million into Stratos through a joint venture with 1PointFive.

As it gears up to kick off operations at Stratos, Occidental is also in talks with XRG, the energy investment arm of the United Arab Emirates-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Co., to form a joint venture for the development of a DAC facility in South Texas. Occidental has been awarded up to $650 million from the U.S. Department of Energy to build the South Texas DAC hub.

The South Texas project, to be located on the storied King Ranch, will be close to industrial facilities and energy infrastructure along the Gulf Coast. Initially, the roughly 165-square-mile site is expected to capture 500,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, with the potential to store up to 3 billion metric tons of CO2 per year.

“We believe that carbon capture and DAC, in particular, will be instrumental in shaping the future energy landscape,” Hollub said.

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

New app by Sports Illustrated grants access to 700 sports courts in Houston

Goal!

A new sports center booking app CatchCorner, powered by Sports Illustrated, enables sports enthusiasts in Houston to seamlessly secure a spot for a quick game without membership fees.

It soft-launched in Houston this spring and, according to co-founder and chief operating officer Maya Azouri, has been a huge success.

"The Houston expansion has been jaw-dropping," she said. "Up until now, CatchCorner’s launch in New York City had been our most successful market, but Houston has launched on par with it."

Within a 30-day period this summer, over 30,000 users join the app, Azouri noted, adding that the app would include 700 unique recreational spaces users can choose from in the city.

"There’s a real sports culture here, with athletes of all levels from casual weekend players to competitive amateurs and even pros. The diversity of the sports community, combined with the number of high-quality facilities across the city, makes it a perfect fit for CatchCorner," she said.

CatchCorner in Houston offers bookings for basketball, volleyball, soccer, pickleball, padel, baseball, badminton, and tennis, with plans to include golf simulators and ice rink sports soon. The Zone Sports, Toros HTX, PAC Gym, and Houston Pickleball Center are among the most popular venues.

Using the app is a snap. Once you pick your sport, venues with available slots are listed including distance from you with the booking schedules in the results so there are no surprises. The slots can go fast, so occasional error messages pop up when trying to book, but it's otherwise a three-click process. CatchCorner also helpfully includes a picture of the facilities while booking.

CatchCorner announced Google integration in June that lets users book through the app directly from searches when they look up specific venues. This is slightly less intuitive to use than the app, but it does ultimately work in both mobile and desktops versions. Either way, it greatly streamlines the booking process for people who just want to schedule a quick pickup game somewhere.

"It’s especially useful for casual players or people who want to organize something on short notice," said Azouri. "Whether it’s a weekend basketball run, a weekday futsal match, or a spontaneous pickleball game with friends, CatchCorner makes it easy to coordinate without the usual logistical headaches.

"Some feedback here has been that we’re like 'Expedia for sports.' It’s because booking a flight online is that easy, booking your next game or workout should be just as simple."

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

10 Houston billionaires make Forbes' list of richest Americans in 2025

The Rich List

America's wealthiest billionaires are $1.2 trillion richer in 2025, bringing their collective worth to a staggering $6.6 trillion. And Houston's own Richard Kinder has become the richest billionaire in the city, according to the new Forbes 400.

The Kinder Morgan chairman is the 11th richest Texas resident and ranks as the 108th richest American. Kinder also dethroned Tilman Fertitta to claim the title as the wealthiest Houstonian.

The annual Forbes 400 list is a definitive ranking of the wealthiest Americans, using interviews, financial data, and documentation provided by billionaires and their companies.

Kinder's wealth

The publication estimates Kinder's net worth at $10.6 billion, up from $8.1 billion last year. He also appears among Forbes' separate list of the richest billionaires in the world.

"It’s been a year unlike any we’ve seen in the four decades we’ve tracked America’s billionaire class,” said Forbes senior editor Chase Peterson-Withorn in a press release. "The super-rich at the very top are richer than ever — and between the White House and the booming stock market, they’re as powerful as they’ve ever been."

Kinder, 80, co-founded oil and gas pipeline firm Kinder Morgan in 1997, which is now known as one of the largest American energy infrastructure companies. He stepped down as CEO in 2015, though he still chairs the board of directors.

Kinder and his wife, Nancy, also founded Houston-based nonprofit the Kinder Foundation in 1997. The organization provides "major gifts to public causes with the intention of helping people realize healthy and rewarding lives," according to its website.

In May 2025, the Kinders pledged $150 million to Texas Children's Hospital and MD Anderson to create the Kinder Children's Cancer Center.

"Our philanthropic efforts center on supporting transformational projects in Houston, and this initiative exemplifies that mission in every way," said Kinder in a press release. "We were deeply impressed by the extraordinary leadership and unwavering commitment of both UT MD Anderson and Texas Children’s to pursue a bold, collaborative model of care. It is a rare and powerful moment when two leading organizations come together to create something entirely new – something capable of reshaping the future of pediatric cancer care."

The richest Houstonians

In all, 43 Texas billionaires made it on the 2025 Forbes 400 list, and 10 are based in the Houston metro.

Hospitality honcho Fertitta, 68, is the second-richest billionaire in Houston, and his net worth has jumped from $10.1 billion last year to $11 billion in 2025. He owns the Golden Nugget Casinos, the Houston Rockets, Texas-based restaurant and entertainment company Landry's, and also serves as the U.S. Ambassador to Italy.

"Serving as President Trump's ambassador to Italy 'is a real job,' says Fertitta, who personally oversaw the renovation of Villa Taverna, the ambassador's residence in Rome," Forbes wrote in his profile.

Fertitta most recently put his ritzy 250-foot-long superyacht on the market for about $192 million, with Forbes saying he "has a bigger one on order."

Here's how the rest of Houston's billionaires fared on this year's list:

  • Oil tycoon Jeffery Hildebrand ties for No. 123 nationally with an estimated net worth of $10 billion. Last year: $7.6 billion.
  • Toyota mega-dealer Dan Friedkin ranks 128th nationally with an estimated net worth of $9.7 billion. Last year: $7.6 billion.
  • Houston pipeline heir Randa Duncan Williams ranks 130th with an estimated net worth of $9.5 billion. Fellow pipeline heirs Dannine Avara and Milane Frantz tie for 135th nationally. Each has an estimated net worth of $9.4 billion. Scott Duncan ranks No. 141 with a $9.2 billion estimated net worth.
  • Houston Texans owner Janice McNair ranks 201st nationally with an estimated net worth of $7.3 billion. Last year: $6.2 billion.
  • Energy exploration chief exec George Bishop of The Woodlands ranks No. 325 with an estimated net worth of $4.7 billion. Last year: $5 billion.

Richest billionaires elsewhere in Texas

The richest person in America in 2025 is none other than Austin-based Elon Musk. Musk, 54, saw his net worth skyrocket to $428 billion this year, or $184 billion more than his 2024 net worth. He claimed the No. 1 spot for the fourth time.

Walmart heiress Alice Walton of Fort Worth was dubbed the wealthiest woman in America for 2025. Walton, 75, simultaneously holds the title as the richest woman in the world. Forbes estimates Walton's net worth at $106 billion (up from $89.2 billion last year) and proclaims her as the first female centibillionaire (a person with a 12-digit fortune) in America. Now that's wealth.

"Tariffs. Inflation. Slowing employment. None of it has hit the fortunes of America’s billionaires," Forbes said. "A decade ago, when it took $1.7 billion to make The Forbes 400, a net worth of $3.8 billion was comfortably within the top half of the ranking — now that lofty sum is the minimum required."

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.