Health care innovators joined Houston Methodist and Texas A&M University's ENMED program to discuss women in health care innovation and venture capital investment. Photo courtesy of Houston Methodist

Houston's health innovation community is making strides every day toward greater quality of care and technology adoption — but what challenges is the industry facing these days?

Through a partnership between Houston Methodist and Texas A&M University's ENMED program at Houston Tech Rodeo, health innovators weighed in on topics surrounding the industry, including biases and investment opportunities.

Missed the conversation? Here are seven key moments from the panels that took place at A&M's new ENMED building in the Texas Medical Center on Thursday, March 3.

“When I look at learning and understanding the priorities — how to take care of patients and also enable those who are doing that work, that’s part of understanding the culture and learning because in the 40 years that I’ve been in the industry, it’s never been the same. There are always things that continue to present challenges from unexpected places.”

​— Ayse McCracken, founder of Ignite Healthcare Network, says on the "Four Fierce Females" panel, referencing the rate of tech disruption and how new technologies, medicine, etc. can change the health care industry and practitioners need to find ways to keep up and stay ahead of the curve.

“Whenever you experience biases, what can you do? You can lean into the fact that we are in a position to help educate and make a change. And that’s going to look different for every one of us, but lean into that instead of feeling down by it.”

— Samantha Lewis, principal at Mercury Fund, says on the "Four Fierce Females" panel, explaining that women across industries should lean into being a change agent when met with bias in the workplace.

“The reason I feel so passionate is (I’m always thinking,) ‘What more can we be doing for our community? What’s working well and what’s not working well,' so I can take that back and make positive changes in our organization.”

— Michelle Stansbury, vice president of innovation and IT applications at Houston Methodist, says on the "Four Fierce Females" panel, explaining that when she's on the other side of the equation as a patient, she really considers her experience and how it could be better.

“Every time you raise money you’re telling a story. You have to figure out what adds value to that story. … I think health care is tricky too because people getting into it aren’t necessarily aware of how complex it is.”

— Dan Watkins, venture partner and co-founder at Mercury Fund, says on the "Where’s My Money At?" investor panel, adding how important it is to investors that founders have specific information — market potential, road map, etc. — when pitching to VCs.

“As a health care startup founder and CEO, you have to wear so many different hats — especially if you’re talking about diagnostics and medical devices. It starts in the science, moves to engineering, and then winds up being commercial. To expect someone to be an expert at all those fields is very difficult.”

— Tim Marx, venture partner at Baird Capital, says on the "Where’s My Money At?" investor panel, adding that, “That’s why we look for the CEOs who really understand where they are, where they’re going, and what they need.”

“One of the things we really appreciate when we engage with founders, it’s not about ‘here’s why my company is great.’ It’s more about understanding the questions your business needs to answer. … If you think about that, that’s what we want to fund. We want to invest in the vision, opportunity, and the people, but we want to fund the — the roadmap — that usually comes with being thoughtful about the questions you’re trying to answer.”

— John Reale, venture lead at TMC Venture Fund, says on the "Where’s My Money At?" investor panel, adding "That's where we get energized."

“The idea to attract talent that’s already built great companies across the US and the world to come here, hire here, and grow here — that’s starting to actually pay off. One of the things that’s big about Houston is it’s really gritty — it’s very ‘show me the data and prove it to me first.’ … We’re having those proven points.”

— Emily Reiser, associate director of innovation at the Texas Medical Center , says on the "Where’s My Money At?" investor panel about the work TMC is doing with its accelerator program.

It's all a numbers game, and Mercury Data Science is about setting up startups for success. Getty Images

Data-focused Houston company arms startups with the AI tools they need to grow

numbers game

While some say a picture is worth a thousand words, having the right data can be make or break. Houston-based Mercury Data Science is using data and artificial intelligence to paint some really specific pictures for its clients.

MDS was born out of a need for Houston-based Mercury Fund's portfolio companies that wanted a firmer handle on artificial intelligence and data science.

"Three years ago, a number of Mercury Fund portfolio companies and potential investments began to have increasingly important data science and AI components," says Dan Watkins, co-founder and managing director of Mercury Fund. "Mercury's partners wanted a deeper understanding of AI, to understand how the cutting edge meets industry use cases."

Mercury Fund's first move was to tap data scientist Angela Wilkins to lead some training, which then turned into even more workshops and advising. The companies ranged from early seed stage startups to companies that had raised over $100 million — and they wanted Wilkins' help, either with the basics of data science or execution of analytics.

"In fact, many of the more established companies were sitting on data assets with plans to build AI-enabled products but didn't have the time or people to really start that process," Wilkins says. "After helping a few companies, we realized the need was pretty deep, and bigger than the Mercury Fund portfolio."

Wilkins, who serves the company as CTO and co-CEO with Watkins, has seen her efforts grow MDS client base. InnovationMap sat down with Wilkins to see how far MDS has come — and where it's going.

InnovationMap: What sort of problems and data solutions are you providing clients?

Angela Wilkins: We love projects that have a direct impact on human health. In health, we build machine learning driven products to create new forms of digital diagnostics to help improve diagnosis in areas like cognitive functioning and depression. We have helped several therapeutics companies accelerate drug discovery and development by extracting insights from biological and imaging data. We have internal tools that use natural language processing to extract knowledge from millions of scientific publications and patents.

We have also worked quite a bit in consumer behavior and some of our physics-oriented data scientists are now working on noise reduction in geophysics technologies.

IM: What feedback do you get from clients?

AW: Company leaders in every sector are feeling the pressure to gain the advantages of AI or risk falling behind. There are many expert level teams available to Fortune 500 organizations. We are one of the very few teams that is entrepreneurial and agile enough to work with earlier stage, high growth organizations.

IM: How does MDS work with Mercury Fund? Has that relationship evolved over the years?

AW: We continue to work with the Mercury Fund portfolio companies but that is a smaller part of what we do. We are venture backed ourselves, and have now become a Mercury Fund portfolio company, with the same growth ambitions as all venture backed companies.

IM: Recently, MDS has seen some growth. How many employees have you added and are you still hiring?

AW: We are up to 20 employees, mostly data scientists, many with 5 to 8 years of experience working in AI, bioinformatics, and data science to provide insights and build products. We are always looking for great data scientists and data engineers to join our team. We also started a fellowship position for recent graduates, and so we can identify and train the next generation of data scientists

IM: What's been the biggest surprise for you as MDS has grown?

AW: We have been able to create this unique culture that thrives on diversity of thought and background. Half of our team is women. We are solving hard problems that benefit from the creativity you get from a wide variety of views.

IM: Where are MDS clients based?

AW: We have clients from San Francisco to Basel. We have learned how to build an integrated, high communication team with the client, so location is not critical.

That being said, we are active in and committed contributors to the Houston innovation ecosystem. Many of us are from a computational biology and bioinformatics background with deep roots in the Texas Medical Center institutions. Houston has amazing talent and we want to show the data scientists that they don't have to leave Houston to work on interesting problems and continue to build skills at the cutting edge while working for companies all over the world.

IM: What sort of trends are you seeing in venture capital? Are these trends happening in Houston?

We are seeing increasing investments in health AI. Fierce Healthcare reports that health AI topped all other sectors last year with $4B invested into AI startups. Andreesen Horowitz has announced their third and largest biotech and health care fund with $750 million to invest: "Machine learning and artificial intelligence [will] have an outsize impact on how we discover drugs and diagnose disease."

We see similar trends in other areas from industrial software to financial services. The upshot is that the adoption of AI creates significant opportunities for startups and significant challenges for larger companies that are not entrepreneurial and able to build their own data science skill set.

As far as Houston goes, the same trends are there but we tend to lag the major technology hubs in adoption. Efforts like TMC Innovation, Station, Rice University/The Ion and Houston Exponential are having a big impact on both the number and pace of startups and, increasingly, those have AI as a key part of their technology stack.

IM: We've talked about how MDS flies under the radar — why do you think that is? Do you think that'll change as you grow?

AW: Our initial focus was on the work for our clients and on building our team. We are ready to be noticed. Thank you for helping us tell the story with this article.

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3 Houston-area companies appear on Fortune’s inaugural AI ranking

eyes on ai

Three companies based in the Houston area appear on Fortune’s inaugural list of the top adopters of AI among Fortune 500 companies.

The three companies are:

  • No. 7 energy company ExxonMobil, based in Spring
  • No. 7 tech company Hewlett Packard Enterprise, based in Spring
  • No. 47 energy company Chevron, based in Houston

All three companies have taken a big dive into the AI pool.

In 2024, ExxonMobil’s executive chairman and CEO, Darren Woods, explained that AI would play a key role in achieving a $15 billion reduction in operating costs by 2027.

“There is a concerted effort to make sure that we're really working hard to apply that new technology to the opportunity set within the company to drive effectiveness and efficiency,” Woods told Wall Street analysts.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is also employing AI to decrease costs. In March, the company announced a restructuring plan — including the elimination of 3,000 jobs — aimed at cutting about $350 million in annual expenses. The restructuring is scheduled to wrap up by the end of October.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s Catalyst cost-cutting program includes a push to use AI across the company to improve efficiency, Marie Myers, the company’s executive vice president and chief financial officer, told Wall Street analysts in June.

“Our ambition is clear: A leaner, faster, and more competitive organization. Nothing is off limits. We are focused on rethinking the business — not just reducing our costs, but transforming the way we operate,” Myers said.

At Chevron, AI tools are being used to quickly analyze data and extract insights from it, according to tech news website VentureBeat. Also, Chevron employs advanced AI systems known as large language models (LLMs) to create engineering standards, specifications and safety alerts. AI is even being put to work in Chevron’s exploration initiatives.

Bill Braun, Chevron’s chief information officer, said at a VentureBeat-sponsored event in 2024 that AI-savvy data scientists, or “digital scholars,” are always embedded within workplace teams “to act as a catalyst for working differently.”

The Fortune AIQ 50 ranking is based on ServiceNow’s Enterprise AI Maturity Index, an annual measurement of how prepared organizations are to adopt and scale AI. To evaluate how Fortune 500 companies are rolling out AI and how much they value AI investments, Fortune teamed up with Enterprise Technology Research. The results went into computing an AIQ score for each company.

At the top of the ranking is Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube), followed by Visa, JPMorgan Chase, Nvidia and Mastercard.

Aside from ExxonMobil, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Chevron, two other Texas companies made the list: Arlington-based homebuilder D.R. Horton (No. 29) and Austin-based software company Oracle (No. 37).

“The Fortune AIQ 50 demonstrates how companies across industry sectors are beginning to find real value from the deployment of AI technology,” Jeremy Kahn, Fortune’s AI editor, said in a news release. “Clearly, some sectors, such as tech and finance, are pulling ahead of others, but even in so-called 'old economy' industries like mining and transport, there are a few companies that are pulling away from their peers in the successful use of AI.”

2 UH projects named finalists for $50M fund to shape future of Gulf Coast

Looking to the Future

Two University of Houston science projects have been selected as finalists for the Gulf Futures Challenge, which will award a total of $50 million to develop ideas that help benefit the Gulf Coast.

Sponsored by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine’s Gulf Coast Research Program and Lever for Change, the competition is designed to spark innovation around problems in the Gulf Coast, such as rising sea levels, pollution, energy security, and community resiliency. The two UH projects beat out 162 entries from organizations based in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas.

“Being named a finalist for this highly competitive grant underscores the University of Houston’s role as a leading research institution committed to addressing the most pressing challenges facing our region,” said Claudia Neuhauser, vice president for research at UH.

“This opportunity affirms the strength of our faculty and researchers and highlights UH’s capacity to deliver innovative solutions that will ensure the long-term stability and resilience of the Gulf Coast.”

One project, spearheaded by the UH Repurposing Offshore Infrastructure for Continued Energy (ROICE) program, is studying ways to use decommissioned oil rig platforms in the Gulf of Mexico as both clean energy hydrogen power generators as well a marine habitats. There are currently thousands of such platforms in the Gulf.

The other project involves the innovative recycling of wind turbines into seawall and coastal habitats. Broken and abandoned wind turbine blades have traditionally been thought to be non-recyclable and end up taking up incredible space in landfills. Headed by a partnership between UH, Tulane University, the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, the city of Galveston and other organizations, this initiative could vastly reduce the waste associated with wind farm technology.

wind turbine recycled for Gulf Coast seawall. Wind turbines would be repurposed into seawalls and more. Courtesy rendering

"Coastal communities face escalating threats from climate change — land erosion, structural corrosion, property damage and negative health impacts,” said Gangbing Song, Moores Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at UH and the lead investigator for both projects.

“Leveraging the durability and anti-corrosive properties of these of decommissioned wind turbine blades, we will build coastal structures, improve green spaces and advance the resilience and health of Gulf Coast communities through integrated research, education and outreach.”

The two projects have received a development grant of $300,000 as a prize for making it to the finals. When the winner are announced in early 2026, two of the projects will net $20 million each to bring their vision to life, with the rest earning a consolation prize of $875,000, in additional project support.

In the event that UH doesn't grab the grand prize, the school's scientific innovation will earn a guaranteed $1.75 million for the betterment of the Gulf Coast.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Kids, kicks and connectivity: Xfinity makes soccer a shared experience

The Beautiful Game

For soccer mom Lana Chase, weekends were a whirlwind of cleats, carpooling, and cheering from the sidelines. Now that her daughter Miah graduated high school in May, the Chase Family’s love for the game hasn't stopped. It's shifted to their living room, where Comcast’s new Xfinity streaming platform brings the global game home.

“We’re a soccer family through and through,” says Chase. “Miah played soccer from about age 8 until 16, and we love the World Cup! Xfinity makes it easy for all of us to watch what we love together.”

One platform, every goal

Xfinity's new World Soccer Ticket package eliminates the chaos of juggling apps, subscriptions, or subpar streams. Families can now enjoy more than 1,500 matches from across the globe.

With parental controls, age-appropriate content, and smart recommendations, Xfinity turns soccer into family-friendly entertainment. Whether it’s a weekend watch party or a quiet school night, the platform adapts to every household’s rhythm.

“Figuring out where to watch your favorite team or match is often a painful game of chance. Now, with World Soccer Ticket, there’s no better way to watch the beautiful game than with Xfinity,” says Jon Gieselman, chief growth officer for Comcast's connectivity & platforms. “It’s easy, we did the work for our customers and pulled together the most coveted leagues and tournaments – from Premier League, LALIGA and Champions League to the World Cup – and put them in one place. We added some magic to the experience, with innovations like Multiview, 4K, and Sports Zone all easily accessible with one simple click or voice command.”

World Cup in Houston

With the 2026 World Cup on the horizon, the timing couldn't have been better. The world tournament will be the largest Spanish-language coverage ever offered by Telemundo, powered by Comcast NBCUniversal's technology, storytelling, and scale.

Telemundo and Peacock hold the exclusive Spanish language rights to "el Mundial," including all 104 matches streaming live on Peacock, with 92 matches airing on Telemundo and 12 on Universo. Live crews will cover every event in all 16 host cities, including Houston.

Xfinity customers will have access to pregame, halftime, and postgame coverage with unprecedented immersive experiences. The 2026 World Cup will be the most exciting event of the summer.

"We know other soccer families who watch matches with their little brothers and sisters. It’s not just a game, it’s family time. It's an even bigger deal with the tournament being just down the road in Houston next year,” Chase adds.

Comcast’s AI-powered platform personalizes the viewing experience, recommending matches and highlights based on each family member’s preferences.

World Soccer Ticket is available for an all-in monthly price of $85. It includes nearly 60 broadcast, cable news, and English- and Spanish-language sports channels, and a subscription to Peacock Premium so customers can enjoy a huge collection of movies, shows, news, and other live sports alongside all their favorite soccer programming.

Subscribe to World Soccer Ticket here.