Houston startup makes a splash as wedding vendor

The biz of fizz

What started as an idea to get kids to drink more water has turned into a profitable party favor company. Courtesy of My Drink Bomb

What started as a way for Chloé Di Leo to encourage her kids to drink more water is now — just a few months later — a startup making a splash on the wedding industry.

Di Leo, the founder, launched My Drink Bomb LLC in Houston at the beginning of summer 2018. She tells InnovationMap that the product was inspired by bath bombs, fizzing once added to a beverage. She created the company with her husband, William Roberts. Together, they own a few local businesses, and Di Leo also is also a jewelry designer at her own store, Chloé Di Leo & Co.

The first flavor created she created for The Bomb Squad, the line for children, was bubblegum, but now she has seven different flavors online, including Strawberry, Birthday Cake, Watermelon, and more.

"Our kids took some to school and came home with some pocket change," says Di Leo. "They weren't supposed to sell it, but the kids liked it."

One day, her kids came home with $40, and she knew the idea was taking off.

The Bomb Squad line quickly transformed into Mixologi, a version of the product meant to be added to alcohol for cocktails. Di Leo tells InnovationMap that the addition stemmed from dinner parties she was hosting with her husband. She put the five major ingredients of a cocktail into a drink bomb.

"It's basically a mixer you drop in," she says. "We wanted to make it super easy and fun to use."

There are currently 23 Mixologi flavors available online, including Margarita, Moscow Mule, Pina Colada, Cosmo, and more. Custom flavors are available and take six to eight weeks to perfect the flavor and recipe before delivery.

To begin crafting the cocktail flavors, Di Leo says that she traveled to Tulum to spend time with a mixologist in Mexico and came back to the states with recipes for the drink bombs.

"Six months later, here we are," says Di Leo.

The company also offers a hangover bomb, crafted from activated charcoal and zesty tangerine extract to reduce headaches and reduce and release toxins in your body, according to the My Drink Bomb website.

The company gained attention after Sabrina Bryan of The Cheetah Girls reached out to Di Leo after finding the company on Instagram. Bryan wanted Mixologi to supply drink bombs for her wedding in October 2018. Custom flavors are available and take six to eight weeks to perfect the flavor and recipe before delivery.

In Spring 2019, Di Leo shares that My Drink Bomb plans to create and launch a coffee and tea drink bomb. She also hopes to create a drink bombs geared toward detox, anti-aging, health, and fitness, and Di Leo wants to work with a mixologist and a health and fitness expert.

In addition to new flavors, My Drink Bomb is heading to local brick and mortar stores — and she has her eye on a few local boutiques and spas, as well as all 20 flagship Specs store.

"When you have an idea, just keep working hard," Di Leo says. "A simple idea can turn into something beautiful."

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UH breakthrough moves superconductivity closer to real-world use

Energy Breakthrough

University of Houston researchers have set a new benchmark in the field of superconductivity.

Researchers from the UH physics department and the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH) have broken the transition temperature record for superconductivity at ambient pressure. The accomplishment could lead to more efficient ways to generate, transmit and store energy, which researchers believe could improve power grids, medical technologies and energy systems by enabling electricity to flow without resistance, according to a release from UH.

To break the record, UH researchers achieved a transition temperature 151 Kelvin, which is the highest ever recorded at ambient pressure since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911.

The transition temperature represents the point just before a material becomes superconducting, where electricity can flow through it without resistance. Scientists have been working for decades to push transition temperature closer to room temperature, which would make superconducting technologies more practical and affordable.

Currently, most superconductors must be cooled to extremely low temperatures, making them more expensive and difficult to operate.

UH physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng published the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month. It was funded by Intellectual Ventures and the state of Texas via TcSUH and other foundations. Chu, founding director and chief scientist at TcSUH, previously made the breakthrough discovery that the material YBCO reaches superconductivity at minus 93 K in 1987. This helped begin a global competition to develop high-temperature superconductors.

“Transmitting electricity in the grid loses about 8% of the electricity,” Chu, who’s also a professor of physics at UH and the paper’s senior author, said in a news release. “If we conserve that energy, that’s billions of dollars of savings and it also saves us lots of effort and reduces environmental impacts.”

Chu and his team used a technique known as pressure quenching, which has been adapted from techniques used to create diamonds. With pressure quenching, researchers first apply intense pressure to the material to enhance its superconducting properties and raise its transition temperature.

Next, researchers are targeting ambient-pressure, room-temperature superconductivity of around 300 K. In a companion PNAS paper, Chu and Deng point to pressure quenching as a promising approach to help bridge the gap between current results and that goal.

“Room-temperature superconductivity has been seen as a ‘holy grail’ by scientists for over a century,” Rohit Prasankumar, director of superconductivity research at Intellectual Ventures, said in the release. “The UH team’s result shows that this goal is closer than ever before. However, the distance between the new record set in this study and room temperature is still about 140 C. Closing this gap will require concerted, intentional efforts by the broader scientific community, including materials scientists, chemists, and engineers, as well as physicists.”

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice University to lead AI conferences in Paris this spring and summer

where to be

Houston’s own Rice University will host a series of conferences on artificial intelligence in Paris, France, starting this month. The series will tackle the impact and possibilities of AI in fields like econometrics and online privacy security.

“Artificial intelligence is transforming the global economy and raising profound questions about how technology intersects with society,” Caroline Levander, Rice’s vice president for global strategy, said in a news release. “By convening scholars from multiple disciplines and countries in Paris, Rice is helping shape the international conversation about how AI should be developed, governed and used.”

The four conferences in Paris aim for a multi-disciplinary approach that tackles aspects of AI from diverging angles. The conferences come as part of Rice’s increased partnership with French researchers at the Université Paris Sciences & Lettres. The two institutions have formed a binary star system of academic sharing and support.

“Paris has quickly become one of the most important global hubs for artificial intelligence research, entrepreneurship and policy,” Levander said. “For Rice, having a presence in the city allows our scholars to engage directly with that ecosystem while building collaborations that connect Europe and the United States around the future of AI.”

The conferences will be held at the Rice Global Paris Center. Topics scheduled are:

Emerging Topics in Operations Management: Platforms, Blockchains and AI

April 27-29

This conference will focus on how companies like Uber, Airbnb, Spotify, and DoorDash can use blockchain ledgers to deliver goods and services more transparently. It will also look at tokenized incentives, presumably forms of cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens in the app space.

Econometrics and AI

May 5-7

This conference will explore how AI can be used in various economic statistical models and practices.

Human Flourishing in the Age of AI

June 3-5

This conference will be a collaboration between engineers and philosophers about the ethics and impact of AI on the lives of its users.

On the Crossroads of AI and Society: Incentives, Privacy and Fairness

July 15-16

This conference will consider how to stakeholders can ensure AI’s actions most benefit people, particularly in the fields of healthcare education, energy and public policy.

Houston claims 19% of Texas’ new live-work-play growth

by the numbers

In Texas, Houston is a big player in the live-work-play real estate movement.

A new 21-city analysis from coworking marketplace CoworkingCafe shows the Houston area added five live-work-play projects—mixed-use developments with residential, office and recreational components—over the past decade.

From 2016 to 2025, Houston accounted for 19 percent of Texas’ new live-work-play inventory, the analysis shows. Among the new local developments were Arrive Upper Kirby, St. Andrie, and The Laura:

  • Arrive Upper Kirby, which was sold in 2021 for $182 million, offers more than 61,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space adjacent to apartments and offices. The 13-story, 265,000-square-foot project was completed in 2017.
  • St. Andrie, a 32-acre, mixed-use community, was completed in 2019. The apartment-anchored development includes an H-E-B grocery store and 37,000 square feet of office space.
  • The Laura, spanning 110,000 square feet, was completed in 2023. Among the apartment complex’s amenities is a coworking space.

According to Northspyre, a software provider for real estate developers, live-work-play projects enable people to meet their needs, such as housing, workplaces, stores, restaurants, and recreation facilities, in a single place.

A total of 542 live-work-play developments opened between 2016 and 2025 in the 21 cities, with another 69 in the pipeline for 2026, CoworkingCafe says. Among major markets, New York City made up the largest share (119) of new live-work-play developments from 2016 to 2025.

The Houston area’s five projects were built in 2018, 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025, CoworkingCafe data indicates, with another project scheduled for completion next year. The Greater Houston Partnership recently highlighted four mixed-use projects taking shape in the region, but only one of them is scheduled to be finished in 2027. It can take two to five years or more to complete a mixed-use development.

Of the five Houston developments finished in the past decade, 56 percent of the space went toward multifamily units, 29 percent toward offices, and 16 percent toward retail, CoworkingCafe says.

As noted by the Houston-Galveston Area Council, economic development in the 21st century “is about cultivating quality live-work-play environments that attract, retain, and grow a diverse and skilled population. Employers and businesses are increasingly choosing to make long-term investments in places that connect and engage people to strengthen economic competitiveness and promote innovation.”

With eight completed projects, Austin led construction of live-work-play developments in Texas from 2016 to 2025, according to CoworkingCafe. Dallas, which welcomed five live-work-play developments during that period, tied with Houston. San Antonio data wasn’t available.

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