Trending this week on InnovationMap is news about a new electric vehicle initiative from the mayor's office, three Houston innovators to know, and more. Photo by PeopleImages

Editor's note: If you zoned out of Houston innovation news this week — perhaps distracted by baseball post-season games — we've got you covered. Some of the highlights include a new electric vehicle initiative from the mayor's office, updates from The Ion, and the Houstonians with the deepest pockets.

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Samantha Lewis, Tilman Fertitta, and Tiffany Masterson are this week's innovators to know in Houston. Courtesy images

Houston entrepreneurs never cease to impress, leaving a mark on the city for their business minds, creativity, and overall gumption. This week's three innovators to know are no exception.

From a startup venture capitalist and Houston's most recognizable billionaire to a local mom that created — and now sold — a skincare line with a cult following, these are this week's innovative Houstonians to keep an eye on. Continue reading.

Station Houston CEO to lead operations at The Ion

The Rice Management Company has created a new operations organization for The Ion and has selected Gabriella Rowe to lead it. Courtesy of Rice University

A Houston innovation leader is switching sides of the table to support on a highly anticipated entrepreneurial hub.

Rice Management Company has created an operating organization for The Ion and has named Gabriella Rowe as the executive director. Rowe has served as CEO of Station Houston since August 2018. The Ion, which broke ground on the site of the Midtown Sears building in July, is expected to deliver early 2021. Continue reading.

Houston billionaires named to Forbes' list of richest Americans for 2019

Pipeline mogul and Memorial Park benefactor Richard Kinder (pictured with his wife, Nancy) leads the Houston billionaires. Photo by Michelle Watson/Catchlight Group

Who's the richest person in Texas? That title once again goes to Walmart heiress Alice Walton, of Fort Worth, according to the newly released Forbes 400 ranking. But seven very wealthy Houstonians also appear on the list of the 400 richest people in the country right now.

The top Houstonian on the list is Houston pipeline mogul Richard Kinder, who is tied with another Walmart heiress, Ann Walton Kroenke, for sixth place in Texas and No. 67 nationally. Forbes estimates they're each worth $7.5 billion. Continue reading.

Mayor announces major effort to reduce emissions on Houston's roadways

Through increasing awareness, affordability, and accessibility, the city of Houston hopes to grow the number of electric vehicles on Houston roads by 2030. Courtesy of EVolve Houston

The city of Houston has taken a major step toward reducing carbon emissions caused by its estimated 1.3 million vehicles that drive the city's streets daily.

Mayor Sylvester Turner announced a new partnership between the government, local businesses, and academic leaders that has created EVolve Houston. The coalition is aimed at boosting electric vehicle sales to 30 percent of new car sales in Houston by 2030. Continue reading.

A Houston entrepreneur is thinking out of the box with smart lockers for food and personal items

Dommonic Nelson wants to make sure everyone's lunches are safe. Photo via cleverboxcompany.com

Someone kept taking Dommonic Nelson's lunch. A Texas Southern University student living at home and commuting from Greenspoint, Nelson only had a few minutes to scarf down his lunches between studying Maritime Transportation. But regularly, he'd reach into the community refrigerator on campus, only to find, well, nothing.

One night, Nelson was in the shower, wondering why his lunch had been taken again, and the long journey to Clever Box Co. began. He barged into his grandfather's room — it was 2:40 in the morning — and told him he had an idea for a series of high-tech boxes designed for storing various things. The boxes could keep personal items (the Stash Box) and packages (the Happy Box) in large companies and coworking spaces, and for people to quickly pick up their food from restaurants without having to wait in line (the Yummy Box). If Nelson couldn't get his lunches back, he was going to make an entire business on making sure no one got stolen from again. Continue reading.

Dommonic Nelson wants to make sure everyone's lunches are safe. Photo via cleverboxcompany.com

A Houston entrepreneur is thinking out of the box with smart lockers for food and personal items

protect your lunch

Someone kept taking Dommonic Nelson's lunch. A Texas Southern University student living at home and commuting from Greenspoint, Nelson only had a few minutes to scarf down his lunches between studying Maritime Transportation. But regularly, he'd reach into the community refrigerator on campus, only to find, well, nothing.

One night, Nelson was in the shower, wondering why his lunch had been taken again, and the long journey to Clever Box Co. began. He barged into his grandfather's room — it was 2:40 in the morning — and told him he had an idea for a series of high-tech boxes designed for storing various things. The boxes could keep personal items (the Stash Box) and packages (the Happy Box) in large companies and coworking spaces, and for people to quickly pick up their food from restaurants without having to wait in line (the Yummy Box). If Nelson couldn't get his lunches back, he was going to make an entire business on making sure no one got stolen from again.

"We're taking ordinary lockers normally found in office buildings and retrofitting them to make them smart lockers," Nelson says.

It wasn't a bad idea, given a 2017 Peapod study that claims 71 percent of Americans have had their lunch stolen. But like most late-night shower ideas, Nelson's didn't work. Firstly, it wasn't a locker — he was stuck on refashioning community refrigerators, and no one wanted to buy in. He denied a $70,000 job offer in the maritime industry to make $14.50 an hour at Southwest Airlines, which gave him free travel. That took him all over the country, and finally, on one trip to California, where a last-minute meeting with Michael Feinberg, whose firm Bluefish Concepts was featured on CNBC's Make Me A Millionaire Inventor, crushed his dreams. You have the right idea, Feinberg said, but the wrong formula. It seemed like nobody needed a smart refrigerator. On the flight home to Houston, Nelson cried.

Nelson had entered entrepreneurship early. As a kid, he found his stepdad's old CDs and asked to try selling them. He made $500 that first week, bought a CD burner, and made $4,000 in three months by ripping tunes from beloved artists and selling them on the cheap. He was making cash in a place where there wasn't a whole lot of it — and he didn't do it by reinventing how music was sold; he just made it a more efficient process for his Greenspoint neighbors.

It was the same idea that would save Nelson's forthcoming business. Back in Houston, some of Feinberg's words echoed in his head: We already have refrigerators, we already have lockers. Why not just enhance them? Nelson didn't need to reinvent the wheel, or the refrigerator. He just needed to bring high-tech efficiency to lockers, to make them more secure but still easy to use.

One day, not long after getting back from his California meeting, Nelson ordered food online. He was busy, trying to work through the kinks in the design and figure out new markets, but he had to wait in line at the restaurant. He thought about the way that many restaurants treat pick-ups as an honor system — leaving them out for anyone to take, just like he had left his food in a refrigerator at school. There had to be a better way to do this, he thought. So he made one.

The rest of 2018, Nelson and a software engineer locked themselves in an attic and coded the design for the Yummy Box, which won Station Houston's Demo Day Pitch Competition that December. The next month, Clever Box Co. received its first order and exhibited their technology at Station Houston 3.0. There, they found Station Houston was struggling to develop a way to store parcels — Nelson collaborated with the start-up hub and designed the Happy Box, which sends messages to users when they have a delivery.

"We looked at it as a great opportunity to diversify our offerings," Nelson says.

Recently, Nelson finalized the pilot program for the Yummy Box at SouthernQ BBQ, a decade-old East Texas barbecue joint that has gained attention in the last few years as one of Houston's best spots.

Clever Box Co., too, is getting awards. Last month, Nelson took home one of 26 Houston Business Journal Fast 100 and Innovation Awards. And right now, he's raising $200,000 in revenue and hopes to expand his teams of three to make smarter and more secure locks for all of the boxes. Eventually, he hopes to partner with food delivery companies like Grubhub and Uber Eats for residential spaces. He imagines a Yummy Box in the lobby of his own apartment building — a driver will drop it off, he says, and Nelson will take the elevator down, walk to the locker, and open it up. Inside, he'll find his lunch. No one will have taken it.

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Texas institute grants $12M to bring leading cancer researchers to Houston

cha-ching

Rice University has recruited a prominent Swedish cancer researcher thanks to a $6 million grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

It’s among $68 million in research grants recently awarded by the state agency, and six recruitment grants totaling $16 million to bring leading cancer researchers to Texas.

A news release from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) describes Pernilla Wittung-Stafshede of the Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, as “an accomplished and highly gifted biophysical scientist tackling complicated biological questions regarding the role of metals and metal dysregulation in various diseases. She pioneered a new research field around the role of metal ions in the folding and function of metalloproteins.”

Metalloproteins account for nearly half of all proteins in biology, according to the National Institutes of Health. They “catalyze some of the most difficult and yet important functions in [nature], such as photosynthesis and water oxidation,” the federal agency says.

Wittung-Stafshede, a professor of chemical biology and life sciences at Chalmers, is a former professor at Rice.

Aside from the money for Wittung-Stafshede, Houston recruitment grants also went to:

  • University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center: $2 million to recruit Rosalie Griffin of the Mayo Clinic
  • Baylor College of Medicine: $2 million to recruit Dr. Nipun Verma of the Yale University School of Medicine
  • Baylor College of Medicine: $2 million to recruit Xin “Daniel” Gao of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In Houston, cancer research grants were given to:

  • Baylor College of Medicine: $7.8 million
  • M.D. Anderson Cancer Center: $20.7 million
  • Rice University: $ 1 million
  • University of Houston: $1.2 million
  • University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston: $4.5 million

“The awards … represent the depth and diversity of CPRIT funding for cancer research in Texas,” says Kristen Doyle, CEO of CPRIT. “These grants develop new approaches to preventing, diagnosing, treating, and surviving cancer for all Texans.”

See the full list of awards here.

2 Houston startups win big at SXSW 2025 pitch competition

winner, winner

Houston had a strong showing at this week's SXSW Pitch showcase in Austin, with two local startups claiming top prizes in their respective categories.

Little Place Labs, a Houston space data startup, won the Security, GovTech & Space competition. Clean-tech company Helix Earth, which spun out of Rice University and was incubated at Greentown Labs, won in the Smart Cities, Transportation & Sustainability contest.

As one of SWSX's marquee events, held March 8-10, the pitch competition featured 45 finalists, selected from 589 applicants, in nine categories.

"We faced impressive competition from a well-chosen set of finalists, and we're honored to be chosen as the winners. One of the judges even commented, ‘Who knew you could make air conditioning sexy,’” Brad Husick, Helix's co-founder and chief business officer, said in a release.

Helix Earth was launched in 2022 and is known for its space capsule air filtration system that was co-developed for NASA. The commercial air conditioner add-on technology, now in a pilot phase, has been used to retrofit HVAC systems for commercial buildings and can save up to 50 percent of the net energy, cutting down on emissions and operating costs, according to the company. Its co-founder and CEO Rawand Rasheed was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 Energy and Green Tech list for 2025.

“This win validates our mission to drive sustainable innovation in commercial air conditioning and beyond. We are excited about the future of Helix Earth and the impact we will have in reducing energy consumption and emissions," Rasheed said in a statement.

Little Place Labs echoed that sentiment with a post on LinkedIn celebrating the win.

"This all started with a simple mission: To deliver real-time space insights to help first responders, mission planners, and decision-makers act before problems arise,” the post read. "Today, that mission feels even stronger."

The company uses advanced AI and machine learning to deliver near-real-time space analytics for both ground and space-based applications. Its software aims to help first responders, mission planners and decision-makers detect anomalies and make informed decisions quickly. It was co-founded in 2020 at Oxford by Houstonian and CEO Bosco Lai and Gaurav Bajaj and participated in the 2023 AWS Space Accelerator.

Two other Houston companies were selected as finalists:

  • Trez, a Latino-focused fintech company that uses AI and voice-command payroll through WhatsApp to provide culturally relevant payroll and streamline financial operations for Latino business owners.
  • Tempesst Droneworx, a veteran-owned software company that's Harbinger software providing real-time contextual intelligence for early warning detection, reducing time to decision and speeding time to action.

Jesse Martinez, founder of invincible, and Anu Puvvada of KPMG were two judges representing Houston.

According to SXSW, 647 companies have participated in SXSW Pitch over the years, with over 93 percent receiving funding and acquisitions totaling nearly $23.2 billion. See the full list of 2025 winners here.