Houston-based clean energy venture firm opens new office, adds partner

making moves

An energy transition venture team has moved into the Ion. Photo courtesy of The Ion

A Houston-based venture capital firm has been busy — with deploying capital, growing its team, and moving into new space.

Energy Transition Ventures has opened an office in the Ion Houston. The fund, which was announced last year, was founded by Craig Lawrence and Neal Dikeman — two former Silicon Valley venture capitalists with Texas ties. The team has a presence in Austin, as well as a satellite office in San Mateo.

"We’re excited after working remotely since we 'opened our doors' during the pandemic, to place our first office in the Ion," says Dikeman, adding that he's excited to work with the community's leadership. "I know several other investors have been looking or are in process to relocate to the Ion, but I believe we are the first venture capital fund to move in. Looking forward to the time when we are just one of long list of funds competing for startup founders’ attentions at Ion."

In addition to the new office space, ETV has also added a third investing partner. Q Song — vice president of GS Group, which was an early investor in the fund — relocated from Seoul, Korea, to Houston last summer to join the organization full time.

“Houston is a natural fit both professionally and personally," Song says. "GS Group has been partnered with Chevron in the GS Caltex refinery, one of five largest refineries in the world, for decades, and there is a huge Korean expat community here as well. For ETV, we needed a place like the Ion both suitable for hosting investors and executives when they come to town, and where startup founders feel comfortable and at home.”

The firm has made investments in four startups, and three have been announced publicly, Dikeman says. The most recent investment was in green hydrogen company Ohmium, which was founded by former SunEdison, Bloom Energy, and Plug Power executives and closed a $45 million round last month.

ETV has also invested in Dronebase, an aerial inspection company for renewables, and Resilient Power, a power electronics startup launching a next generation EV Fastcharging product.

Craig Lawrence and Neal Dikeman co-founded a new venture capital firm focused on funding technology as a part of the energy transition. Photos courtesy

New Houston-based venture capital firm emerges to focus on energy transition

money moves

Two Texas entrepreneurs recently announced what they say is the first venture fund in Texas exclusively dedicated to investing in energy transition technologies.

Houston-based Energy Transition Ventures — led by Craig Lawrence and Neal Dikeman — officially emerged from stealth mode with anchor investment from two operating companies from the GS Group of Korea. The fund closed its first capital in February this, completed its first investment in March, and looks to close new investors for a total fund size of $75 million, according to a press release.

"In the near future, energy is going to be delivered and used completely differently. Marginal and average energy and CO2e prices are now on a long term deflationary trend," says Dikeman in the release. "There are 500 multi-billion dollar energy companies globally, and massive portions of global GDP, that are going to get disrupted in the energy transition, from energy & power, transport, real estate, industrial to consumer to agriculture."

Dikeman, who is the managing partner at Old Growth Ventures, a family office investor, also chairs the board at nonprofit cleantech accelerator Cleantech.org, virtual research institute. In 2001, he co-founded San Francisco based cleantech investment firm Jane Capital in 2001.

"We've been successful being highly selective as investors, and using our deep networks and understanding of energy and technology to avoid pitfalls other investors faced. It is exciting to be off the bench to do it again," he continues.

Lawrence, who's also been a part of the cleantech revolution for a chunk of his career, previously started and led the cleantech investing effort at Accel Partners and was previously vice president of product at software company Treverity. The duo chose the Energy Capital of the World to headquarter ETV.

"Texas is the energy capital of the world, and outside of corporate venture capital, there are not many venture funds in the state," says Lawrence. "So it makes sense to start an energy transition focused fund here as the latest wave of clean technology investing accelerates."

ETV will fund from seed to series B with select late-stage opportunities, according to the release, and will colocate a Silicon Valley office with GS Futures, the Silicon Valley-based corporate venture capital arm of energy, construction, and retail conglomerate GS Group of Korea.

"We're excited to be investing in ETV and in the future of energy," says Tae Huh, managing director of GS Futures, in the release. "Energy Transition Ventures is our first investment from the new GS Futures fund, and we've already run successful pilots in Korea with three US startups even before this fund closed an investment – we are working to accelerate the old model of corporate venture dramatically."

Jon Wellinghoff, former chair of FERC, and Deb Merril, president of EDF Retail and co-founder and former co-CEO of Just Energy, have also joined ETV as advisors. GS Energy executive Q Song moves from Seoul, Korea, to join the Houston ETV investment team, according to the release.

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Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

  • Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
  • Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
  • Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
  • Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

  • No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • No. 105 SLB
  • No. 120 Baker Hughes
  • No. 125 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 158 NRG Energy
  • No. 176 Targa Resources
  • No. 185 Chevron
  • No. 195 Halliburton
  • No. 223 Coterra Energy
  • No. 229 Waste Management
  • No. 235 Exxon Mobil
  • No. 250 Kinder Morgan
  • No. 257 Quanta Services
  • No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
  • No. 285 Sysco
  • No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
  • No. 318 Camden Property Trust
  • No. 333 EOG Resources
  • No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
  • No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
  • No. 401 Crown Castle
  • No. 408 Phillips 66
  • No. 500 APA
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