3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes John Higgins of illumiPure, Natara Branch of HX, and Daniel Murray of Covenant Underwriters. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from insurtech to entrepreneurship — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

John Higgins, CEO of illumiPure

CleanWhite can quickly and continuously sanitize high-touch areas through its light-based technology. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based illumiPure recently announced that it has received a worldwide patent for its LED white light disinfectant earlier this year, known as CleanWhite. The product can quickly and continuously sanitize high-touch areas while a room remains occupied and has shown an elimination of 99 percent of surface bacteria, spores, mold, biofilms, and viruses including SARS-CoV-2 through light-based technology. It's intended to be used in areas like kitchens, restrooms, and locker rooms and is safe for humans and pets.

CleanWhite uses spikes of light wavelengths at 405 and 470 nanometers to kill surface pathogens. Unlike other products on the market, CleanWhite can emit these levels without also emitting a visible purple-violet light while also suppressing blue light wavelengths.

"CleanWhite features technology that makes it the first of its kind, achieving a sought-after solution to produce 405+470 nm blue light as white light," John Higgins, CEO of illumiPure, says in a statement. "As a result of this revolutionary finding, we anticipate the patent’s success across a myriad of industries, including education, healthcare, hospitality, and retail.” Click here to read more.

Natara Branch, CEO of Houston Exponential

Meet Natara Branch — the new CEO of HX. Photo courtesy of Natara Branch

Ever since she accepted the new position as CEO of Houston Exponential, Natara Branch has been on a listening tour of Houston's innovation ecosystem. Branch explains on the Houston Innovators Podcast that she has a passion for the city of Houston, and she's got open ears to anyone in the ecosystem who wants to contribute to the advancement of the city's tech ecosystem.

As she explains, she is getting her fair share of feedback — but she has an ask for anyone who she's met.

"I am challenging people. You're not just going to give me feedback and sit back and watch. You're going to participate," Branch says. "I have not met one person who doesn't want Houston to win — they wouldn't be here if they didn't." Click here to read more and listen to the podcast.

Daniel Murray, co-founder and chief underwriter of Covenant Underwriters

The emerging insurtech industry has a plethora of opportunities for job seekers and more. Photo courtesy

More than 100,000 Houstonians work in insurance, according to Daniel Murray, co-founder and chief underwriter of Covenant Underwriters, a Houston-based insurtech start-up, building e-commerce insurance products for underserved niches. But the 400-year-old industry is hungry for tech talent.

In a guest column for InnovationMap, Murray explains the need for tech and innovation within insurance — and the opportunity the industry has.

"The adage goes that everyone in the insurance industry was either born into it or tricked into it," he writes. "This may have applied to the last generation, but today’s insurance industry offers vast opportunities (including remote) for every discipline, especially for tech job seekers." Click here to read more.

The emerging insurtech industry has a plethora of opportunities for job seekers and more. Photo via Getty Images

Houston expert: The insurance biz is ripe for innovation — here's how to tap into it

guest column

The insurance industry is hungry for tech talent. This 400-year-old industry lays claim to many innovations from financial engineering to weather modeling and was among the first to widely adopt mainframe computing. However, while many sectors took up digital processes in the Internet Age, the $1.4 trillion insurance industry lost out on a generation of innovators to retail, social media, entertainment, and other financial services. Only recently have investors become wise to the massive opportunity of modernizing insurance.

More than 100,000 Houstonians work in insurance, mostly in sales and servicing of policies or claims. Many insurance agencies now employ IT professionals and graphic designers to support online experiences for customers and employees. Larger insurance companies are hiring data analysts, software developers, and cloud engineers to improve risk selection, mitigate losses, and drive efficiency. Such efforts to leverage technology in each function in the insurance value chain are broadly described by the term insurtech (or insuretech; it’s so novel that consensus has not been reached on its spelling).

The largest gathering of insurtech investors, entrepreneurs, and industry incumbents occurs at the InsureTech Connect conference. Last month saw nearly 10,000 insurtech leaders and hopefuls descend on Las Vegas for the 6th annual convention. Sound business models and partnerships with incumbents replaced the easy money and talk of disruption from prior years. Many speakers and panels highlighted the following opportunities for aspiring insurtech professionals:

​Embedded Insurance

Insurance has long been sold alongside other products, and omnipresent API ecosystems make the transaction that much more seamless. For a small premium, some insurtechs use embedded products that take the risk out of large purchases like event tickets, rentals, gadgets, and vacations. These companies need savvy designers and creative marketing pros to integrate their products with the right partners.

​Parametric Insurance

The fundamental principle of insurance is to make the policyholder whole after a loss, but agreeing on the amount of loss can take years and legal battles. Parametric insurance policies pay losses automatically based on pre-specified trigger events, such as a threshold based on wind speed or hail size. Cutting-edge products provide stability by tying coverage to indexes like oil price or crop yields and require experts in the underlying index to set the correct parameters.

​Internet of Things

Theoretically, more information will lead to more accurate prediction of insured loss. Cell phone geolocation, smart homes, and sensors on everything gives insurance companies a mountain of data. Translating all of this into actionable insights will require armies of data scientists. Machine learning algorithms, paired with good data, promise to uncover new ways to anticipate and avoid losses.

​Insurance Gigs

Many jobs in the burgeoning gig economy are related to insurance. For all the big data available, insurance companies still need ‘boots on the ground’ when inspecting a new policyholder’s property, assessing damage to a house or car, installing sensors, or responding to catastrophe. They especially need contract workers with drone licenses for inspecting roofs.

Insurtech is not disrupting insurance companies but transforming them to meet modern customer needs They can no longer succeed with just snappy TV ads and countless storefronts. Insurance quotes and claim payments need to be fast and fair. In an industry this large, a great idea that captures 1 percent of market share or improves efficiency by 1 percent can be lucrative. Today’s rate environment has cooled off insurtech valuations but not before 25 US and UK insurtech start-ups rose to billion-dollar unicorn status in the past decade.

The adage goes that everyone in the insurance industry was either born into it or tricked into it. This may have applied to the last generation, but today’s insurance industry offers vast opportunities (including remote) for every discipline, especially for tech job seekers.

------

Daniel Murray is co-founder and chief underwriter of Covenant Underwriters, a Houston-based insurtech start-up, building e-commerce insurance products for underserved niches.

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Houston robotics co. closes series B after year of growth

money moves

Houston- and Boston-based Square Robot Inc. closed a series B round of funding last month.

The advanced submersible robotics company raised $13 million, according to Tracxn.com, and says it will put the funds toward international expansion.

"This Series B round, our largest to date, enables us to accelerate our growth plans and meet the surging global demand for our services,” David Lamont, CEO, said in a statement.

The company aims to establish a permanent presence in Europe and the Middle East and grow its delivery services to reach four more countries and one new continent in Q1 2025.

Additionally, Square Robot plans to release a new robot early next year. The robot is expected to be able to operate in extreme temperatures up to 60 C. The company will also introduce its first AI-enabled tools to improve data collection.

Square Robot launched its Houston office in 2019. Its autonomous, submersible robots are used for storage tank inspections and eliminate the need for humans to enter dangerous and toxic environments.

The company was one of the first group of finalists for the Houston Innovation Awards' Scaleup of the Year, which honors a Bayou City company that's seen impressive growth in 2024. Click here to read more about the company's growth.

------

This article originally ran on EnergyCapital.

Show me the money: Top Houston innovation grant and gift news of 2024

year in review

Editor's note: As the year comes to a close, InnovationMap is looking back at the year's top stories in Houston innovation. Money means a lot to startups and other innovative entities, and while startups are usually scouting venture capital investors, grants and donations are key too. These are the most-read news articles about grants and gifts — be sure to click through to read the full story.

Rice researchers secure $35M federal grant to advance medical device technology

Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad will lead the effort to commercialize the device. Photo courtesy Rice University

Rice University has secured part of a nearly $35 million federal grant aimed at commercializing a bioelectric implant for treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The federal Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health awarded the $34.9 million grant to Rice and several other universities.

Rice’s Biotech Launch Pad will lead the effort to commercialize the self-contained, implantable Rx On-site Generation Using Electronics (ROGUE) device. ROGUE houses cells that are engineered to produce type 2 diabetes and obesity therapies in response to patients’ needs. Continue reading.

Houston health care institutions receive $22M to attract top recruits

The grants, which are between $2 million to $6 million each, are earmarked for recruitment of prominent researchers. Photo via Getty Images

Houston’s Baylor College of Medicine has received a total of $12 million in grants from the Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas to attract two prominent researchers.

The two grants, which are $6 million each, are earmarked for recruitment of Thomas Milner and Radek Skoda. The Cancer Prevention & Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) announced the grants May 14.

Milner, an expert in photomedicine for surgery and diagnostics, is a professor of surgery and biomedical engineering at the Beckman Laser Institute & Medical Clinic at the University of California, Irvine and the university’s Chao Family Comprehensive Cancer Center. Continue reading.

New report ranks Houston top market for life sciences

Houston lands in the No. 7 spot for growth in the granting of degrees in biological and biomedical sciences. Photo by Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

Thanks in large part to producing hundreds of college-trained professionals, Houston’s life sciences industry ranks among the top U.S. markets for talent in 2024.

In a report published by commercial real estate services company CBRE, Houston lands in the No. 7 spot for growth in the granting of degrees in biological and biomedical sciences. From 2017 to 2022, Houston notched a growth rate of 32.4 percent in this category.

In 2022, the University of Houston led the higher education pack in the region, graduating 746 people with a bachelor’s degree or above in biological or biomedical sciences, according to the report. Continue reading.

Texas organization grants $68.5M to Houston institutions for recruitment, research

Several Houston organizations have received millions from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Photo via tmc.edu

Three prominent institutions in Houston will be able to snag a trio of high-profile cancer researchers thanks to $12 million in new funding from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The biggest recruitment award — $6 million — went to the University of Texas MD Anderson Center to lure researcher Xiling Shen away from the Terasaki Institute for Biomedical Innovation in Los Angeles.

Shen is chief scientific officer at the nonprofit Terasaki Institute. His lab there studies precision medicine, including treatments for cancer, from a “systems biology perspective.” Continue reading.

Houston health care institution secures $100M for expansion, shares renderings

Baylor College of Medicine's Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower is set to open in 2026. Rendering courtesy of SLAM Architecture

Baylor College of Medicine has collected $100 million toward its $150 million fundraising goal for the college’s planned Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.

The $100 million in gifts include:

  • A total of $30 million from The Cullen Foundation, The Cullen Trust for Health Care, and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education.
  • $12 million from the DeBakey Medical Foundation
  • $10 million from the Huffington Foundation
  • More than $45 million from members of Baylor’s Board of Trustees and other community donors, including the M.D. Anderson Foundation, the Albert and Margaret Alkek Foundation, and The Elkins Foundation.

“The Cullen Trust for Health Care is very honored to support this building along with The Cullen Foundation and The Cullen Trust for Higher Education,” Cullen Geiselman Muse, chair of The Cullen Trust for Health Care, says in a news release. “We cannot wait to see what new beginnings will come from inside the Lillie and Roy Cullen Tower.” Continue reading.

TMC launches cancer-focused partnership with Japan

global collaboration

Houston's Texas Medical Center announced the launch of its new TMC Japan BioBridge and Japan-Accelerator Cancer Therapeutics and Medical Devices, or JACT, this month.

The strategic partnership between Japan-based Mitsui Fudosan Co. Ltd. and the National Cancer Center will focus on advancing cancer treatments and providing a pathway for Japanese innovators to expand in the U.S. market. A delegation from TMC recently visited Tokyo, and William F. McKeon, president and CEO of TMC, signed the TMC Japan BioBridge Memorandum of Understanding with Takeshi Ozane, general manager of Mitsui Fudosan, and Hitoshi Nakagama, president of the National Cancer Center of Japan.

“The launch of TMC Japan BioBridge is a vital step forward in connecting two global leaders in healthcare innovation,” McKeon says in a statement. “Japan’s leadership has demonstrated an impressive commitment to advance medical cures and life sciences technologies and through this partnership, we are opening necessary doors for Japanese researchers and innovators to access the US market and collaborate with our TMC ecosystem. Together, we aim to accelerate critical breakthroughs to make a difference for patients all around the world.”

The new JACT will offer cancer-treatment companies a structured process to prepare for a U.S. expansion and will allow for meetings with pharmaceutical companies, hospital systems and investors and provide insights on U.S. regulatory approvals. It'll focus on three key areas, according to the statement:

  1. Milestone development and financial planning
  2. Clinical and regulatory expertise
  3. Strategic partnerships and market insights

“This TMC Japan BioBridge and JACT Program will enable us to promote the advancement of start-up companies aiming to commercialize innovative medical technologies originating in Japan into the U.S." Nakagama says in a statement. "We also hope this collaboration will not be limited to our (Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development)-supported project, but will lead to further cooperation between TMC, NCC, and other Japanese institutions in various fields.”

This is the sixth international strategic partnership for the TMC. It launched its first BioBridge, which focus on partnerships to support international healthcare companies preparing for U.S. expansion, with the Health Informatics Society of Australia in 2016. It also has BioBridge partnerships with the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark and the United Kingdom.

View All Listings