Houston medical device startup names new CEO

now at the helm

Houston-based Saranas has tapped a new leader amidst push to commercialize bleed detection technology. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based medical device company Saranas has tapped a veteran of the healthcare industry as its new CEO.

Mike MacKinnon most recently was president and partner at Madison Ventures +, a private equity firm based in Greenwood Village, Colorado. The firm invests in companies in healthcare, real estate, finance, and other sectors.

Before joining Madison Ventures +, MacKinnon was CEO of Zidan Medical, a startup focused on treatment of airway lesions in patients with early stage lung cancer. He served in that role from 2019 to 2023.

Earlier, he was CEO of ROX Medical, a medical device company specializing in minimally invasive vascular therapy for patients with uncontrolled high blood pressure. He held that role from 2018 to 2019. He previously worked at Philips North America, Volcano, AtheroMed, Hansen Medical, Access Closure, and FoxHollow Technologies.

In a news release, Dan Wolterman, chairman of Saranas’ board and former president and CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System, calls MacKinnon “an accomplished executive with an impressive record of bringing disruptive technology to market, guiding strategy, and driving significant growth.”

Now president and CEO of Nashua, New Hampshire-based medical device company Conformal Medical, James Reinstein was president and CEO of Saranas from 2020 to 2022. Prior to Reinstein, Zaffer Syed held that position from 2017 to 2020. He's still an adviser for the company and recently announced his role as entrepreneur in residence at the Texas Medical Center.

Saranas is working on commercializing its Early Bird Bleed Monitoring System, touted as the first and only system FDA-approved bleeding detection system for procedures involving blood vessels. It is designed to detect bleeds early, enabling physicians to reduce medical risks and potentially avoid costly medical problems.

“Bleeding remains a common issue during and after endovascular procedures and can result in life-threatening complications,” says MacKinnon.

Since being founded in 2013, Saranas has treated over 1,200 patients with its device and has received $29.2 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. This includes a $12.8 million Series B round that Saranas got in 2021 from Chicago-based Baird Capital and Austin-based S3 Ventures.

The Early Bird device was developed at Houston’s Texas Heart Institute. The FDA approved the device in 2019.

Here are three of the latest updates on new execs and advisory appointments from Houston startups. Photo via Getty Images

3 Houston startups announce strategic appointments across health tech, materials, and software

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Three Houston tech startups have new hires they're excited about this summer. From new board members to c-level execs, here's who's moving and shaking in Houston innovation.

Former Memorial Hermann CEO joins board of ZIBRIO

This Houston medical device startup has added a big name to its board. Photo courtesy of ZIBRIO

Dan Wolterman, who served as president and CEO of Memorial Hermann Health System for 15 years, has been named to the board of directors of Houston-based ZIBRIO. The health tech company, which was founded based on NASA technology, has developed a device that measures balance.

"We're delighted to have Dan on the team," says Katharine Forth, ZIBRIO CEO and co-founder, in a news release. "He understands ZIBRIO's vision to work across the full continuum of care, empowering older patients and clinicians with quantifiable fall prevention. His experience and enthusiasm will be invaluable in helping us to achieve it."

Falling is the top cause of trauma injury and trauma death across all age groups, according to ZIBRIO's release, and the current cost of falls in people over 65 is $50 billion – which is expected to double.

"ZIBRIO is coming to market at a time when population health and prevention are key for Healthcare systems to generate outcomes. They have a strong team and an elegant solution to a complex problem that will help millions," Wolterman says in the release.

Inhance adds to its C-suite

Inhance Technologies has added an integral member to its leadership. Photo via inhancetechnologies.com

Inhance Technologies, an international provider of polymer material science solutions based in Houston, has named its new CFO. Andrew Leeser, previously at Cimarron Energy, has joined the company to lead global finance, accounting and treasury functions, as well as human resources and information technology.

"I'm delighted to welcome Andrew to the Inhance Technologies family. He has an excellent track record in organizations spanning a range of industries, and I'm sure that his experience will help us continue on our upward trajectory," says Andrew Thompson, president and CEO of Inhance Technologies, in a news release. "We look forward to working with him to build a bright future for the company and our customers as we help them make a conscious choice towards more sustainable plastics."

The company just recently announced its expansion, including another new C-level exec and a new 75,000-square-foot site in St. Louis.

"I'm very pleased to have joined Inhance Technologies and I look forward to helping the organization achieve its goals over the next few years. With the significant growth in demand for our fully recyclable barrier technology Enkaseä, as well as our global expansion, there is no doubt I'm joining the company at an exciting time," says Leeser in the release.

Houston fintech unicorn names new council

Meet the new council dedicated to supporting HighRadius's new platform. Photo via LinkedIn

HighRadius, a Houston-based fintech company that reached unicorn status last year, has announced the members of its advisory council for its new microlearning and community platform Highako Academy.

Bob Shultz, managing partner of Quote-to-Cash Consulting, will serve as chairman of the council.

Other council members include:

  • John LaRocca, Sr. Director of Global Credit, Hitachi Vantara
  • Roger Torneden, Director of Business, Management and Legal Programs for UCLA Extension
  • R. Britt Hastey, Chair, Business Administration Department, Los Angeles City College
  • Bruce Lynn, Managing Partner, the FENG LLC
  • Scott Blakeley, Partner, Blakeley LLP

The council "will identify and improve courseware, certification programs and the methods of delivery based on current and future industry and professional trends," according to an email from the company. Highako Academy is aimed at helping teams and customers develop critical industry skills.

"Our customers have asked us for an online self-service learning platform, and that led us to launch highako.com as a beta platform last year," says Urvish Vashi of HighRadius in a recent release. "With 10,000+ users on the platform and a vibrant partner ecosystem consisting of credit groups, collection agencies, attorneys and industry associations, we see this echoing a larger trend of millennials and Gen Z gravitating towards microlearning platforms."

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How Houston innovators played a role in the historic Artemis II splashdown

safe landing

Research from Rice University played a critical role in the safe return of U.S. astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission this month.

Rice mechanical engineer Tayfun E. Tezduyar and longtime collaborator Kenji Takizawa developed a key computational parachute fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis system that proved vital in NASA’s Orion capsule’s descent into the Pacific Ocean. The FSI system, originally developed in 2013 alongside NASA Johnson Space Center, was critical in Orion’s three-parachute design, which slowed the capsule as it returned to Earth, according to Rice.

The model helped ensure that the parachute design was large enough to slow the capsule for a safe landing while also being stable enough to prevent the capsule from oscillating as it descended.

“You cannot separate the aerodynamics from the structural dynamics,” Tezduyar said in a news release. “They influence each other continuously and even more so for large spacecraft parachutes, so the analysis must capture that interaction in a robustly coupled way.”

The end result was a final parachute system, refined through NASA drop tests and Rice’s computational FSI analysis, that eliminated fluctuations and produced a stable descent profile.

Apart from the dynamic challenges in design, modeling Orion’s parachutes also required solving complex equations that considered airflow and fabric deformation and accounted for features like ringsail canopy construction and aerodynamic interactions among multiple parachutes in a cluster.

“Essentially, my entire group was dedicated to that work, because I considered it a national priority,” Tezduyar added in the release. “Kenji and I were personally involved in every computer simulation. Some of the best graduate students and research associates I met in my career worked on the project, creating unique, first-of-its-kind parachute computer simulations, one after the other.”

Current Intuitive Machines engineer Mario Romero also worked on Orion during his time at NASA. From 2018 to 2021, Romero was a member of the Orion Crew Capsule Recovery Team, which focused on creating likely scenarios that crewmembers could encounter in Orion.

The team trained in NASA’s 6.2-million-gallon pool, using wave machines to replicate a range of sea conditions. They also simulated worst-case scenarios by cutting the lights, blasting high-powered fans and tipping a mock capsule to mimic distress situations. In some drills, mock crew members were treated as “injured,” requiring the team to practice safe, controlled egress procedures.

“It’s hard to find the appropriate descriptors that can fully encapsulate the feeling of getting to witness all the work we, and everyone else, did being put into action,” Romero tells InnovationMap. “I loved seeing the reactions of everyone, but especially of the Houston communities—that brought me a real sense of gratitude and joy.”

Intuitive Machines was also selected to support the Artemis II mission using its Space Data Network and ground station infrastructure. The company monitored radio signals sent from the Orion spacecraft and used Doppler measurements to help determine the spacecraft's precise position and speed.

Tim Crain, Chief Technology Officer at Intuitive Machines, wrote about the experience last week.

"I specialized in orbital mechanics and deep space navigation in graduate school,” Crain shared. “But seeing the theory behind tracking spacecraft come to life as they thread through planetary gravity fields on ultra-precise trajectories still seems like magic."

Rice Alliance names first head of platform & more innovation headlines

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Editor's note: The top April innovation headlines to know include Rice Alliance's newly minted head of platform and FDA approval for a local medtech startup. Below are the five most-read InnovationMap stories from April 1-15, 2026:

1. Rice Alliance names Houston healthtech exec as first head of platform

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has named its first head of platform. Houston entrepreneur Laura Neder stepped into the newly created role last month, according to an email from Rice Alliance. Neder will focus on building and growing Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform. The emerging platform, which is being promoted by Rice Alliance and the Ion, aims to connect founders with the "people, capital and expertise they need to scale." Continue reading.

2. Houston medtech startup clears FDA approval for new surgical tool

Prana Surgical has developed a minimally invasive, image-guided, single-use tissue extraction tool. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based Prana Surgical will soon bring a new electrosurgical tool to operating rooms around the country. The Prana System officially cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this month. Prana Surgical began as Prana Thoracic in 2022. Back then, the company primarily focused on developing screening tools for lung cancer diagnosis. It raised $6 million in series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 before transitioning to broader surgical needs in 2025. Continue reading.

3. Houston leads U.S. in population growth for 2025, Census says

The 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. Photo via Getty Images

Imagine that the Houston metro area swallowed a city the size of Pearland in just one year. That’s essentially what happened from 2024 to 2025, with the Houston metro ranking first in the U.S. for population growth based on the number of people. New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show the 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. That’s just shy of Pearland’s roughly 133,000-resident tally. Continue reading.

4. 8+ can't-miss Houston business and innovation events in April


From the Rice Business Plan Competition to the Veterans Business Battle, here's what not to miss in April and how to register. Photo courtesy the Ion

Houston's weeklong innovation festival kicked off April, followed by Rice University's globally recognized pitch competition returning for its 26th year. Plus, find coworking pop-ups, industry meetups, pitch battles and even a crawfish boil on the calendar. Continue reading.

5. Houston unicorn closes $421M to fuel first phase of flagship energy project

Tim Latimer, CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy. Photo courtesy of Fervo Energy

Houston geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy has closed $421 million in non-recourse debt financing for the first phase of its flagship Cape Station project in Beaver County, Utah. Fervo believes Cape Station can meet the needs of surging power demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing and an energy market aiming to use clean and reliable power. According to the company, Cape Station will begin delivering its first power to the grid this year and is expected to reach approximately 100 megwatts of operating capacity by early 2027. Fervo added that it plans to scale to 500 megawatts. Continue reading.

UH breakthrough moves superconductivity closer to real-world use

Energy Breakthrough

University of Houston researchers have set a new benchmark in the field of superconductivity.

Researchers from the UH physics department and the Texas Center for Superconductivity (TcSUH) have broken the transition temperature record for superconductivity at ambient pressure. The accomplishment could lead to more efficient ways to generate, transmit and store energy, which researchers believe could improve power grids, medical technologies and energy systems by enabling electricity to flow without resistance, according to a release from UH.

To break the record, UH researchers achieved a transition temperature 151 Kelvin, which is the highest ever recorded at ambient pressure since the discovery of superconductivity in 1911.

The transition temperature represents the point just before a material becomes superconducting, where electricity can flow through it without resistance. Scientists have been working for decades to push transition temperature closer to room temperature, which would make superconducting technologies more practical and affordable.

Currently, most superconductors must be cooled to extremely low temperatures, making them more expensive and difficult to operate.

UH physicists Ching-Wu Chu and Liangzi Deng published the research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences earlier this month. It was funded by Intellectual Ventures and the state of Texas via TcSUH and other foundations. Chu, founding director and chief scientist at TcSUH, previously made the breakthrough discovery that the material YBCO reaches superconductivity at minus 93 K in 1987. This helped begin a global competition to develop high-temperature superconductors.

“Transmitting electricity in the grid loses about 8% of the electricity,” Chu, who’s also a professor of physics at UH and the paper’s senior author, said in a news release. “If we conserve that energy, that’s billions of dollars of savings and it also saves us lots of effort and reduces environmental impacts.”

Chu and his team used a technique known as pressure quenching, which has been adapted from techniques used to create diamonds. With pressure quenching, researchers first apply intense pressure to the material to enhance its superconducting properties and raise its transition temperature.

Next, researchers are targeting ambient-pressure, room-temperature superconductivity of around 300 K. In a companion PNAS paper, Chu and Deng point to pressure quenching as a promising approach to help bridge the gap between current results and that goal.

“Room-temperature superconductivity has been seen as a ‘holy grail’ by scientists for over a century,” Rohit Prasankumar, director of superconductivity research at Intellectual Ventures, said in the release. “The UH team’s result shows that this goal is closer than ever before. However, the distance between the new record set in this study and room temperature is still about 140 C. Closing this gap will require concerted, intentional efforts by the broader scientific community, including materials scientists, chemists, and engineers, as well as physicists.”

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

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