Overheard: Houston experts discuss women in med tech, insight from investors, and more

Eavesdropping in Houston

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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Baylor scientist lands $2M grant to explore links between viruses and Alzheimer’s

Alzheimer’s research

A Baylor College of Medicine scientist will begin exploring the possible link between Alzheimer’s disease and viral infections thanks to a $2 million grant awarded in March.

Dr. Ryan S. Dhindsa is an assistant professor of pathology & immunology at Baylor and a principal investigator at Texas Children’s Duncan Neurological Research Institute (Duncan NRI). He hypothesizes that Alzheimer’s may have some link to previous viral infections contracted by the patient. To study this intriguing possibility, the American Brain Foundation has gifted him the Cure One, Cure Many award in neuroinflammation.

“It is an honor to receive this support from the Cure One, Cure Many Award. Viral infections are emerging as a major, underappreciated driver of Alzheimer's disease, and this award will allow our team to conduct the most comprehensive screen of viral exposures and host genetics in Alzheimer's to date, spanning over a million individuals,” Dhindsa said in a news release. “Our goal is to identify which viruses matter most, why some people are more vulnerable than others, and ultimately move the field closer to new therapeutic strategies for patients.”

Roughly 150 million people worldwide will suffer from Alzheimer’s by 2050, making it the most common cause of dementia in the world. Despite this, scientists are still at a loss as to what exactly causes it.

Dhindsa’s research is part of a new range of theories that certain viral infections may trigger Alzheimer’s. His team will take a two-fold approach. First, they will analyze the medical records of more than a million individuals looking for patterns. Second, they will analyze viral DNA in stem cell-derived brain cells to see how the infections could contribute to neurological decay. The scale of the genomic data gathering is unprecedented and may highlight a link that traditional studies have missed.

Also joining the project are Dr. Caleb Lareau of Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Dr. Artem Babaian of the University of Toronto. Should a link be found, it would open the door to using anti-virals to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s.

Tesla Robotaxi service officially launches in Houston and Dallas

Future of the Roads

Tesla’s Robotaxi service has taken to the streets of Houston. In a brief statement Saturday, April 18 on its X social media account, Tesla Robotaxi says the autonomous rideshare service just launched in Texas’ two biggest metro areas — Houston and Dallas.

“Try Tesla Robotaxi in Dallas & Houston!” Tesla CEO Elon Musk says in a reposting on X of the Robotaxi announcement.

One of Robotaxi’s competitors, Alphabet-owned Waymo, beat the Tesla service to the Dallas, Houston, and Austin markets. Another competitor, Amazon-owned Zoox, has Dallas flagged for its autonomous rideshare service.

Robotaxi previously kicked off in Austin, where Tesla is based and manufactures electric vehicles, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Nearly 50 Robotaxis operate in Austin, where the service’s inaugural rides happened last year, and more than 500 in the San Francisco area.

Of the three rides logged in a 31-square-mile area in Dallas as of Monday morning, the average fare was $7.96 and the average trip was 3.5 miles, according to an online tracker of autonomous rideshare services. The tracker showed only one Robotaxi was on the roads in Dallas.

As of Monday morning, a 25-square-mile area in Houston had two Robotaxis on the road, according to the online tracker. The average fare for five recorded rides was $11.34 and the average trip was six miles.

“We want Robotaxi pricing to be simple and easy for you to understand,” according to the Robotaxi website. “Initially, as part of our introductory program, we will charge a simple, affordable rate plus applicable taxes and fees for all rides within the available service area.”

The tracker shows the Robotaxi in Dallas did not have a human aboard to monitor each trip, and only one of Houston’s two Robotaxis did not have a human monitor in the driver’s seat.

For now, all passengers ride in Tesla Model Y cars. Robotaxi operates from 6 am-2 am daily.

To use the service, you first must download the Robotaxi app, which works only on iPhones.

Robotaxi lets you stream music and adjust climate settings and seat positioning from the Robotaxi app or the vehicle’s touchscreen. Climate and media settings are stored in your Robotaxi profile and automatically transfer from one vehicle to another. If you own a Tesla, certain profile settings and media preferences are available in your own car as well as in a Robotaxi.

In January at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Musk said a “widespread” network of driverless rideshare vehicles would be operating in the U.S. by the end of this year, CNBC reported.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Houston VC funding surged nearly 50% in Q1 2026, report says

VC victories

First-quarter venture capital funding for Houston-area startups climbed nearly 50 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

In Q1 2026, Houston-area startups raised $532.3 million, a 49 percent jump from $320.2 million in Q1 2025, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

However, the Q1 total fell 23 percent from the $671.05 million raised in Q4 2025.

Among the first-quarter funding highlights in Houston were:

  • Utility Global, which focuses on industrial decarbonization, announced a first close of $100 million for its Series D round.
  • Sage Geosystems raised a $97 million Series B round to support its geothermal energy storage technology.

Those funding rounds underscore Houston’s evolution as a magnet for VC in the energy sector.

“Today, the energy sector is increasingly extending into the startup economy as venture capital flows into companies developing the technologies that will shape the future of global energy,” the Greater Houston Partnership says.

The energy industry accounted for nearly 40 percent of Houston-area VC funding last year, according to market research and lead generation service Growth List.

Adding to Houston’s stature in VC for energy startups are investors like Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arm of Houston-based oil and gas giant Chevron; Goose Capital; Mercury Fund; and Quantum Energy Partners.

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