Meet 5 of the fastest-growing scaleup companies in Houston

houston innovation awards

These five scaleups stood out to the judges of the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards. Photo via Getty Images

The 2024 Houston Innovation Awards will feature a new category: Scaleup of the Year, which honors a Bayou City company that's seen impressive growth in 2024.

From biotech companies to decarbonization startups, the inaugural finalists have expanded internationally, moved to larger facilities, completed clinical trials and more. Read on to learn more about these fast-growing startups.

Secure your tickets to the 2024 Houston Innovation Awards next Thursday, November 14, at TMC Helix Park.


Cart.com, a unified commerce and logistics solutions provider for B2C and B2B companies

With the acquisition of Amify, Cart.com has expanded its workforce and grown its suite of services. Photo courtesy of Cart.com

Clinching unicorn status with its 2023 series C raise, Cart.com is on a mission to unify commerce across sales and distribution channels and digital and physical capabilities with its omnichannel enterprise-grade software, services and logistics.

Founded in 2020 with nine acquisitions and $759.2 million raised to date, according to Crunchbase, Cart.com's recent achievements includes acquiring Pacsun’s fulfillment operators, brining a 2 million-square-foot facility online, expanding its executive team, and more.

"In the last 12 months, Cart.com has dramatically grown its fulfillment network’s scale and technological capabilities," writes CEO Omail Tariq in his Houston Innovation Awards application.

"We have been laser-focused on improving quality, performance and efficiency at scale while continuing to aggressively grow our customer base, expand our capabilities to customers in new industries and grow our physical presence to new locations," he continues. "Prioritizing our strategic growth initiatives has been critical in the current macroeconomic environment as profitable growth remains paramount for our team."

In 2021, Cart.com moved its headquarters to Austin, with most of the leadership team remaining in Houston. Two years later, the company announced its HQ return to the Bayou City.

"We've found Houston's business and university communities to be incredibly supportive of our efforts and have found the city to be a place that is both easier and more affordable to bring together our global employee population at more regular intervals," Tariq adds in the app.

Coya Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company developing therapies for neurodegenerative, autoimmune, and metabolic diseases

Houston company with revolutionary neurodegenerative disease treatment shares milestones since IPOCoya Therapeutics rang the closing bell at Nasdaq last week, celebrating six months since its IPO, new data from trials, and additions to its team. Photo via LinkedIn

Revolutionary biotech company Coya Therapeutics Inc. (NASDAQ: COYA) may have closed its IPO in January 2023 for more than $15 million, but the company has made some of its most significant strides in the development of its lead product that prevents the further spreading of neurodegenerative diseases this year.

Known as COYA 302, the product uses a unique dual mechanism that is now being developed for the treatment of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD), Parkinson’s disease and Alzheimer’s disease. The company published its phase 1 proof-of-concept study in the peer-reviewed journal Frontiers in Neurology that showed COYA 302's ability to stop clinical progression in ALS at 24 weeks in combination therapy, which helped earn the company a $5 million in strategic investment from the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation to continue to develop the product for a planned Phase 2 trial focused on FTD.

Last year the company also added to its C Suite, naming Dr. Arun Swaminathan as chief business officer and Dr. Fred Grossman as president and chief medical officer.

Coya merged with Nicoya Health Inc. and raised $10 million in its series A in 2020.

NanoTech Materials, a chemical manufacturer that integrates novel heat-control technology with thermal insulation, fireproofing, and cool roof coatings to drastically improve efficiency and safety

Growing Houston startup moves into 43,000-square-foot facility amid 'hypergrowth phase'NanoTech Materials celebrated its move into a new facility — a 43,000-square-foot space in Katy, Texas, this week

Mike Francis, co-founder and CEO of NanoTech Materials, told InnovationMap earlier this year that it was in a "hype growth" phase—and meant it.

NanoTech, known for its proprietary Insulative Ceramic ParticleTM (ICP) that uses nanotechnology to optimize energy efficiency and heat control in the built environment, expanded into a new 43,000-square-foot facility this year and tripled its valuation in the last two years, according to its Innovation Awards application. The company also expanded into the Middle East and Singapore and successfully scaled up its NanoTech Cool Roof Coat to commercial markets.

The company closed a $5 million seed round in 2020 and an oversubscribed Series A round last year for $13 million. It was the first company selected for the Houston-based Halliburton Labs in 2021 and joined the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator in 2023.

Square Robot, an advanced robotics company serving the energy industry and beyond by providing submersible robots for storage tank inspections

Square Robot has a team of 15 in Houston. Photo courtesy\u00a0of Square Robot

Submersible robotics company Square Robot launched its Houston office in 2019 and expanded in the Bayou City this past year.

According to the company's Innovation Award application, the company doubled its fleet of autonomous, submersible robots that service the energy industry, deploying to Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Australia, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Its robots are specifically used for storage tank inspections and eliminating the need for humans to enter dangerous and toxic environments.

Square Robot moved to a new, customer-facing Houston facility this year and also developed a new innovative technology that's able to gather phased ultrasonic readings on insulated tank shells while the tank is operational.

The company closed a Series A round in 2018 for $6 million.

Syzygy Plasmonics, a company that's decarbonizing chemical production with a light-powered reactor platform that electrifies the production of hydrogen, syngas, and fuel with reliable, low-cost solutions

Houston climatetech startup selected for inaugural global entrepreneur competitionSyzygy Plasmonics is going to be competing in Gastech's new startup competition. Photo courtesy of Syzygy

Known for the world’s first light-powered reactor cell for industrial chemical reactions, Syzygy Plasmonics began taking orders earlier this year for its Rigel reactor cell after meeting initial performance targets. The cell enables a customer to produce up to five tons of low-carbon hydrogen per day.

The groundbreaking technology earned the company regional, national and global attention. Fast Company magazine placed the company on its energy innovation list. It was also named a finalist for Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 Gulf South Award and was invited to participate in Gastech's global entrepreneur competition.

The company most recently raised $76 million in a Series C round in 2022.

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Houston health tech co. lands NIH grant for AI cancer prediction tool

fresh funding

Houston-based CellChorus and Stanford Medicine were recently awarded a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research grant for the company's AI platform to test how certain cancer patients will respond to therapies.

The funding comes from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health. According to a filing, the grant totaled just under $400,000.

CellChorus, which spun out from the University of Houston’s Technology Bridge, has developed TIMING (Time-lapse Imaging Microscopy In Nanowell Grids), which analyzes the behavior of thousands of individual immune cells over time and can identify early indicators of treatment success or failure.

The company will work with Stanford's Dr. David Miklos and Dr. Saurabh Dahiya, who have built the Bone Marrow Transplantation and Cell Therapy Biobank. The biobank manages and stores biological samples from patients treated at their clinic and in clinical trials.

"Predicting which patients will achieve durable responses after CAR-T therapy remains one of the most important challenges in the field,” Miklos said in a news release. “We aim to uncover functional cellular signatures that can guide treatment decisions and improve patient outcomes.”

The project will specifically profile cells from patients with relapsed/refractory large B-cell lymphoma (r/rLBCL). According to CellChorus, only about half of r/rLBCL patients who receive CAR-T therapy "achieve a durable, long-term remission." Others do not respond to therapy or experience relapse.

“The sooner we know whether a cancer therapy is working, the better. To maximize patient benefit, we need technology that can provide a robust and early prediction of response to therapy. The technology needs to be scalable, cost-efficient, and capable of rapid turnaround times,” Rebecca Berdeaux, chief scientific officer of CellChorus, added in the release. “We are excited to work with Drs. David Miklos and Saurabh Dahiya and their colleagues on this very important project.”

CellChorus has previously received SBIR grants from federal agencies, including a $2.5 million award in 2024 from its National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) and a $2.3 million SBIR Fast-Track award from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences in 2023.

Houston museum showcases America's founding documents in rare exhibit

Experience History

As the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, Houstonians have a chance to see rare documents from the founding of the nation. Freedom Plane National Tour: Documents That Forged a Nation, presented by the National Archives Foundation, will be on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science through Monday, May 25.

The collection includes a rare engraving of the original Declaration of Independence; official Oaths of Allegiance signed by George Washington, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton; a draft of the Bill of Rights; the Treaty of Paris, the documented that recognized America's independence from Great Britain; and the tally of votes approving the Constitution.

The National Archives specifically chose Houston as one of only eight cities in the country to host the exhibit as a means to help the documents reach a wider audience outside of the main hub of semiquincentennial events in New England and the Washington, D.C. area.

"One of the things we decided when we put the tour together because we wanted to be off the East Coast," said Patrick Madden, CEO of the National Archives Foundation, who was onsite for the exhibit's opening in Houston. "There's a lot of 250th celebration stuff happening in the original 13 colonies. How do we get it to major markets where larger numbers of people can see it? So in the case of Houston, obviously, [is a] major market in this part of the country, but also we've partnered with the museum twice before with National Archives exhibits, so we knew that they would be up to the task of handling the exhibit and the crowds."

The star of the collection is a rare engraving of the original Declaration of Independence. Secretary of State and future president John Quincy Adams commissioned 200 exact replicas of the document from engraver William J. Stone in 1823. Less than 50 now remain. Madden joyfully pointed out that there are errors in this document, a potent reminder that the men who forged a nation made mistakes.

"There's a couple of typos in it where they had to make corrections," said Madden. "So even the founders, you know, they're all human. That resonates because here these people are making this move against the most powerful nation in the world and putting their lives on the line for a country based on ideas."

Other impressive parts of the collection include official Oaths of Allegiance signed by George Washington, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton, as well as one of the drafts of the Bill of Rights. Many states would not ratify the Constitution until certain rights were included in the document, leading to Washington going on a national tour assuring state leaders enshrining protections was first on the list. The draft copy on display specifically shows the First Amendment in progress.

Houston is the fourth stop on the exhibition's tour, which will take the documents to Denver, Miami, Dearborn, and Seattle through the summer. Freedom Plane is just one part of a larger patriotic celebration at the HMNS, which includes a film series celebrating American science and culture and general Americana decoration throughout the main hall.

Admission to Freedom Plane is free to the public, but separate from general admission to the museum. Space is limited, and passes are available on a first-come, first-serve basis. Non-members should expect long waits or the possibility that the day's passes are sold out. Only museum members can reserve passes for specific times. Flash photography is prohibited due to the fragile nature of the documents.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Houston quantum energy chip startup emerges from stealth with $12M round

seed funding

Houston-based Casimir has emerged from stealth with a $12 million seed round to commercialize its quantum energy chip.

The round was led by Austin-based Scout Ventures. Lavrock Ventures, Cottonwood Technology, Capital Factory, American Deep Tech, and Tim Draper of Draper Associates also participated in the round. The oversubscribed round exceeded the company’s original $8 million target, according to a news release.

Casimir’s semiconductor chips can generate power from quantum vacuum fields without the need for batteries or charging. The company plans to commercialize its first-generation MicroSparc chip by 2028.

The MicroSparc chip measures 5 millimeters by 5 millimeters and is designed to produce 1.5 volts at 25 microamps, comparable to a small rechargeable battery, without degradation and no replacement cycle.

“Casimir represents exactly the kind of breakthrough dual-use technology Scout Ventures was built to back,” Brad Harrison, founder and managing partner at Scout Ventures, said in the release. “This is based on 100 years of science and we’re finally approaching a commercial product … We’re proud to lead this round and support Casimir’s journey from applied science to deployed technology.”

Casimir says it aims to scale its technology across the ”full power spectrum,” including large-scale energy systems that can power homes, commercial infrastructures and electric vehicles.

Casimir's scientific work has been supported by DARPA-funded nanofabrication research and its technology was incubated at the Limitless Space Institute (LSI). LSI is a nonprofit that works to innovate interstellar travel and was founded by Kam Ghaffarian. Technology investor and serial entrepreneur Ghaffarian has been behind companies like X-energy, Intuitive Machines, Axiom Space and Quantum Space.

Harold “Sonny” White, founder and CEO of Casimir, believes the technology can power devices for years without replacements.

“Millions of devices will operate for years without a battery ever needing to be replaced or recharged because we have engineered a customized Casimir cavity into hardware capable of producing persistent electrical power,” White added in the release. “I spent nearly two decades at NASA studying how we power humanity’s future. That work led me to the Casimir effect and the quantum vacuum, where new tools have allowed us to build on a century of scientific knowledge and bring abundant power to the world.”

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