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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Intuitive Machines lands $1M grant to expand robotics operations

Expansion mode

Houston-based Intuitive Machines is expanding its operations around the country.

The space tech company—which has offices and labs in Texas, California, Arizona, Colorado and Maryland—announced that it has received a $1 million grant from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore through the state's Build Our Future Grant. The funding will go toward expanding Intuitive Machines’ Super Cislunar Robotics Assembly Building (Supa-CRAB) Mechanisms and Robotics Center of Excellence in Anne Arundel County.

The company will move into a 69,000-square-foot facility and build out additional lab and office space. It will also procure equipment that will allow for in-house Assembly, Integration and Test (AI&T) activities, according to a news release. Intuitive Machines says the expansion will take place this fall.

“This collaboration shows how industry, state programs, and education can reinforce one another,” Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said in the release. “Maryland invests in innovation, companies grow and hire, students gain experience, and communities benefit from new opportunities and long-term career pathways. Together with Governor Moore, the state of Maryland, and Anne Arundel County leaders, we are building a permanent path to long-term lunar operations, an advanced robotics and mechanisms center of excellence, and a technology edge for our nation.”

Intuitive Machines first launched operations in Maryland in 2021 and has since expanded five times in the state. The company officially opened its robotics and mechanisms facility in 2024.

The Maryland team has built robotics and mechanisms for the Nova-C landers and IM-1 and IM-2 missions. In the future, Intuitive Machines expects the Maryland team to work on its IM-3 Rover Deployment Mechanism (RDM), a 360 pan-tilt camera for panoramic views, the Main Engine Gimbal (MEG), and the company's first data relay satellite, known as Altus-1.

Intuitive Machines moved into a new $40 million headquarters at the Houston Spaceport in 2023. The company announced an expansion of its lease last year.

The company announced a $175 million equity investment to fuel growth in March. It's since landed a $180 million NASA CLPS award to deliver seven payloads to the moon's Mons Malapert on the IM-5 mission.

5 Houston universities named best in the world on new U.S. News list

Top of the Class

Five Houston-area universities have been named among the best universities worldwide in U.S. News & World Report's just-released comprehensive list for 2026-2027.

U.S. News' Best Global Universities report ranks more than 2,250 schools based exclusively on their academic research performance and international reputation. Only 275 universities from the U.S. were included in the global ranking, and 21 based in Texas.

Harvard University topped the list for 2026-2027, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Stanford University claimed the coveted No. 2 and No. 3 spots worldwide.

Houston's Baylor College of Medicine topped the list of the best local schools, and it ranked as the 144th best university in the world.

Here's how the rest of Houston's local institutions ranked:

No. 201 – Rice University
No. 324 – University of Texas Health Science Center Houston
No. 390 – University of Houston
No. 599 – University of Texas Medical Branch Galveston

In a statement explaining global university trends, the managing editor for Education at U.S. News, LaMont Jones, Ed.D., said schools in the U.S. have continued to rank "disproportionately high" while major universities from other countries in China and South America are starting to catch up.

"The continuing strength of [American university] reputations and academic research are, for the most part, unmatched," he said. "It's why students all over the world flock here to learn."

Top-ranking Texas universities
The University of Texas at Austin ranked No. 1 statewide and No. 56 worldwide, further cementing the university's reputation as the top choice for students seeking a higher education in Texas.

Earlier in June, UT Austin ranked No. 35 in a separate list of the best universities in the world from the Center for World University Rankings, which compared 2,000 schools globally.

Here's where other Texas universities stand among the top 1,000 in this year's global rankings:

No. 113 – University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas
No. 177 – Texas A&M University, College Station
No. 296 – University of Texas at San Antonio
No. 451 – Baylor University, Waco
No. 503 – University of Texas at Dallas
No. 562 – Texas Tech University, Lubbock
No. 739 – University of North Texas, Denton
No. 975 – University of Texas at Arlington
No. 944 – Southern Methodist University, Dallas

Additionally, six Texas universities ranked outside the top 1,000: University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (No. 1,153); University of Texas El Paso (No. 1,238); Texas State University in San Marcos (No. 1,531); Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center in Lubbock (No. 1,871); Texas Christian University in Fort Worth (No. 1,906); and Sam Houston State University in Huntsville (No. 2,141).

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Rice student startup lands $1.85M to launch medical drone network

critical cargo

Students at Rice University have developed a medical cargo drone transport system to help deliver sensitive medical supplies and improve mobile healthcare efforts.

Haast Autonomous is the brainchild of graduating seniors Ege Halac, Jason Chen and Santiago Brent, who got their venture idea off the ground with help from the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) Summer Venture Studio. The founders have developed the prototype at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) with fellow Rice researchers Felix Hasson, Ethan Javedan, Kenna Sanders and Caden Schmidt.

The startup has raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding, according to Rice. The founders plan to focus on Haast full-time following graduation. They said they aim to launch pilot trials in 2027 and head to market later that year.

“We need better alternatives for a fast, safe and on-demand system of transport for life-critical cargo,” Halac said in a news release from Rice.

The Haast team has developed a custom aircraft with software that manages dispatch, routes, and chain of custody to assist in how materials move between sites in centralized medical systems. Generally, the transportation of medical supplies and materials between facilities and points of care relies on ground shipping or expensive air transport.

Haast Autonomous’ aircraft can take off and land vertically, and is designed around a mission profile of 50 to 62 miles. It can carry a payload of at least 5 pounds, with future versions intended to scale up in size. It also includes a built-in payload bay that regulates temperature, pressure, vibration and tilt to protect sensitive contents such as patient samples, antivenom or poisoning kits and radioligands or other therapies, according to Rice.

At first, the company envisioned the mission to be centered around transplants, but saw the product being best suited for a variety of operations.

“What we realized is that the platform we are building is suited for medicine, but it really underlies a much larger problem of mission-critical transport across industries,” Brent added in the news release. “We are building the fastest, most secure logistics chain for the world’s most sensitive cargo.”

Haast Autonomous was recognized at the 2026 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase and Competition, where it won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology. It also performed well in the 2026 Napier Rice Launch Challenge.

In the future, Haast Autonomous plans to deploy a fleet of aircraft. The software will be designed to assist hospitals in requesting flights and tracking deliveries in real time.

“The drone is only part of the solution,” Chen also added in the release. “What matters is moving something from point A to point B in a way that fits into how hospitals already operate.”

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