3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Thomas Vassiliades of BiVACOR, Katie Mehnert of ALLY Energy, and Don Whaley of OhmConnect Texas. Courtesy photos

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

Thomas Vassiliades, CEO of BiVACOR

BiVACOR named Thomas Vassiliades as CEO effective immediately. Photo courtesy of BiVACOR

Thomas Vassiliades has been named CEO of BiVACOR, and he replaces the company's founder, Daniel Timms, in the position. BiVACOR is on track to head toward human clinical trials and commercialization, and Vassiliades is tasked with leading the way.

Vassiliades has over 30 years of experience within the medical device industry as well as cardiothoracic surgery. He was most recently the general manager of the surgery and heart failure business at Abiomed and held several leadership roles at Medtronic. Dr. Vassiliades received his MD from the University of North Carolina, and his MBA was achieved with distinction at Emory University.

“I am excited and honored to join the BiVACOR team, working closely with Daniel and the entire team as we look forward to bringing this life-changing technology to the market,” says Dr. Vassiliades in the release. “Throughout my career, I’ve been guided by the goal of bringing innovative cardiovascular therapies to the market to improve patient care and outcomes – providing solutions for those that don’t have one. BiVACOR is uniquely well-positioned to provide long-term therapy for patients with severe biventricular heart failure.” Click here to read more.

Katie Mehnert, CEO and founder of ALLY Energy

Katie Mehnert joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss the future of energy amid a pandemic, climate change, the Great Resignation, and more. Photo via Katie Mehnert

Katie Mehnert started ALLY Energy — originally founded as Pink Petro — to move forward DEI initiatives, and she says she started with building an audience first and foremost, but now the technology part of the platform has fallen into place too. Last summer, ALLY Energy acquired Clean Energy Social, which meant doubling its community while also onboarding new technology. On the episode, Mehnert reveals that this new website and platform is now up and running.

"We launched the integrated product a few weeks back," Mehnert says. "The whole goal was to move away from technology that wasn't serving us."

Now, moving into the new year, Mehnert is building the team the company needs. She says she hopes to grow ALLY from two employees to 10 by the end of the year and is looking for personnel within customer support, product developers, and sales and service. While ALLY is revenue generating, she also hopes to fundraise to further support scaling. Click here to read more.

Don Whaley, president at OhmConnect Texas

Texas is about a month away from the anniversary of Winter Storm Uri — would the state fair better if it saw a repeat in 2022? Photo courtesy

The state of Texas is about a month away from the one year anniversary of Winter Storm Uri — but is the state better prepared this winter season? Don Whaley, president at OhmConnect Texas, looked at where the state is now versus then in a guest column for InnovationMap.

"Governor Abbott has gone on record guaranteeing that the lights will stay on this winter, and I am inclined to agree. With the reinforcement of our fuel systems being mandated by the Railroad Commission, 2023 to 2025 should receive the same guarantee," he writes. "Beyond that, as the demand for electricity in Texas continues to grow, we will need to rely on the initiatives under consideration by the PUCT to attract investment and innovation in new, dispatchable generation and flexible demand solutions to ensure long-term stability in the ERCOT market.

Whaley has worked for over 40 years in the natural gas, electricity, and renewables industries, with specific experience in deregulated markets across the U.S. and Canada. He founded Direct Energy Texas and served as its president during the early years of deregulation. Click here to read more.

Texas is about a month away from the anniversary of Winter Storm Uri — would the state fair better if it saw a repeat in 2022? Photo by Lynn in Midtown via CultureMap

Opinion: Houston energy expert weighs in on if the state's power grid is ready for winter

guest column

The Winter Storm Uri, which struck Texas in February of 2021, was an unprecedented event in both severity and duration. At its most extreme, temperatures were as much as 40 to 50 degrees below their historic averages. The storm resulted in the largest controlled blackout in U.S. history, forcing the shedding of more than 23 gigawatts of load, the loss of power to 4.5 million homes and businesses for periods of one to four days, and the tragic loss of hundreds of lives.

A crisis of this magnitude has resulted in an intense re-examination of the Texas power grid. Not surprisingly, it has also resulted in record levels of finger-pointing and an ongoing search to identify the parties responsible. Among the casualties were all three Public Utility Commissioners that regulate the industry and a virtual purge of ERCOT, the organization that operates and manages the grid.

The Texas 87th Legislature filed an inordinate number of bills to address the electric system's failings, and Governor Abbott’s office has been vocal and actively working to ensure that there will never again be a repeat of the events of February 2021. The principal focus of the now reconstituted and expanded Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) has been defining and implementing changes to system rules and operations in order to extract a greater degree of reliability from existing assets and incentivize the construction of significantly more MW of dispatchable generation. Many of the changes implemented by the PUCT will provide the market with a greater cushion against shocks to the system, moving the market away from a crisis management mode and towards a more proactive footing. We can expect even more change once current policies are assessed and more aggressive proposals are analyzed to determine whether they offer more benefit than harm to the market.

Amid all the debate, discussion, and wringing of hands, only one report has come close to identifying the smoking gun at the center of the crisis: the need for weatherization. The notion that weatherizing of generating assets is the key to future reliability has been discussed ad nauseum, but the report issued by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission on November 16, 2021, attributes an equal share of the blame to the natural gas producing, processing, and transportation sector and its inability to perform reliably under the harsh conditions of Uri.

In the areas affected worst by the storm, gas production in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana fell by more than 50 percent at its lowest point when compared to average production in the prior month. The Railroad Commission, not the Public Utility Commission, regulates natural gas transmission, and it was slow off the mark given the focus on generation. The Railroad Commission has now begun to implement weatherization requirements, with new initiatives slated to be in full effect for the winter of 2023.

It is imprudent to use “never” as a time scale, but I would place the probability at “remote” that Texas will see a recurrence of the events of February 2021 in 2022. In the unlikely event we did, the impacts would likely pale in comparison to those experienced last February. This is due both to the heightened state of preparedness with which the industry will approach the coming winter and the impact of changes put into effect by the PUCT as of January 1, 2022.

Governor Abbott has gone on record guaranteeing that the lights will stay on this winter, and I am inclined to agree. With the reinforcement of our fuel systems being mandated by the Railroad Commission, 2023 to 2025 should receive the same guarantee. Beyond that, as the demand for electricity in Texas continues to grow, we will need to rely on the initiatives under consideration by the PUCT to attract investment and innovation in new, dispatchable generation and flexible demand solutions to ensure long-term stability in the ERCOT market.

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Don Whaley is president at OhmConnect Texas and has worked for over 40 years in the natural gas, electricity, and renewables industries, with specific experience in deregulated markets across the U.S. and Canada. He founded Direct Energy Texas and served as its president during the early years of deregulation.

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Intuitive Machines lands $148M as part of NASA Moon Base funding

to the moon

Houston-based Intuitive Machines has been awarded $148.3 million to deliver its Nova-C lander to the moon by 2028. The funding is part of $600 million that NASA recently awarded to three companies as part of the agency’s Moon Base Program.

The contracts aim to support sustained human presence and commercial operations on the Moon. Austin-based Firefly Aerospace was awarded $144.2 million by NASA for one mission and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic netted $297.9 million for two lunar landings. Intuitive Machine's award is the company's sixth task order under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“We’re building a proving ground for Moon Base operations,” Ryan Stephan, NASA’s Moon Base acting director of cargo landers, said in a news release. “Accelerating our Moon mission ordering cadence and launch opportunities enable us to move quickly to learn, iterate, and improve.”

Under the latest task order, Intuitie Machines will deliver three scientific and operational payloads to the moon, which include a:

Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) radiation monitor to gather critical environmental safety data
Advanced stereo cameras to analyze surface-plume interactions (SCALPSS)
Laser retroreflector array (LRA) for precise cislunar positioning

The funding breakdown includes a $68.6 million base contract and a $79.7 million performance incentive for Intuitive Machines.

The company says the funding will allow it to create a standardized and repeatable "lunar utility pipeline" for delivering cargo to the moon.

"We are shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure," Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said in a separate news release. "Our flight-proven Nova-C platform allows us to build, test, and deploy multiple landers in parallel using Industry 4.0-powered manufacturing. This contract directly advances our core mission to provide persistent, reliable, and commercial baseline of transport, connectivity, and operations that allows our customers to stay longer and achieve more on the Moon."

NASA also shared that it is exploring plans to send PROMISE, a rover based on the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, to the moon and it plans to seek proposals for additional lunar lander missions, technology demonstrations, a communications and navigation satellite network, and new science payloads to support its lunar outpost. NASA is developing its Moon Base near the lunar South Pole. The agency expects it to come to fruition sometime after 2032.

Intuitive Machines had received its last CLPS award for $180.4 million in March 2026. It will be the first mission to utilize the company's larger cargo lunar lander, Nova-D. The company was also recently awarded a $1 million grant from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to expand its robotics operations in the state.

UT team develops wearable technology for atmospheric water harvesting

In The Air

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a prototype jacket that harvests clean drinking water directly from the atmosphere, and it works even in the driest desert conditions.

The research, published in Science Advances, marks the latest milestone in nearly a decade of work by materials scientist and chair professor Guihua Yu and his team at the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute. The wearable technology marks a significant leap: instead of a bulky, stationary machine, this jacket does the work.

Photo courtesy of UT Austin

"We have been working on atmospheric water harvesting technology for a number of years," Yu says. "This current version is even more wearable. We're transitioning from conventional, more stationary water harvesting to something truly portable and personal."

Yu's lab first published work on hydrogel-based water harvesting around 2019, and the jacket is the latest evolution of that platform, now called AirGel. Last year, the broader AirGel invention won the top prize in the graduate category of the National Collegiate Inventors Competition.

The jacket is woven with specially engineered hydrogel fibers; ultra-porous materials that attract and absorb moisture from the surrounding air much like a household desiccant. Unlike a desiccant, the material doesn't require intense heat to release that water. The hydrogel is thermally responsive, meaning a modest rise in temperature — even from mild solar heating — is enough to release the water it has captured.

So, somebody would be wearing the jacket, or perhaps carrying this gel-like textile as a blanket, as it passively absorbs moisture from the air. Then they would detach the textile panels and place them into a small, portable collector unit; essentially a compact heater. The water evaporates out of the textile, condenses inside the collector, and drips out as clean, drinkable water.

"It immediately becomes drinkable because it already goes through the distillation process," Yu explains.

In trials, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of water per day depending on humidity, or roughly 14-30 ounces, nearly a quart, depending on the air's humidity. With one kilogram of the textile, the researchers found they could generate approximately 3.7-4 liters of water in arid conditions, and potentially double that in humid ones. So far, the team has tried the jacket out in very dry, semi-dry, and humid areas, and the jacket was able to pull water from each climate.

Lead researcher Chuxin Lei, a postdoctoral researcher on Yu's team and co-author on the paper, says the goal was to rethink who this technology could serve.

"Many current [atmospheric water harvesting] systems are still built as rigid or stationary platforms, making them less suitable for people who are moving, working outdoors, or operating in some remote environment. This lead us to ask whether we could build a water harvesting system that could become more like clothing — light, wearable, flexible, and naturally suited for personal use," Lei says.

The potential applications are wide-ranging. Yu's team has previously worked with the Department of Defense on water solutions for soldiers, where water logistics can be dangerous and costly. The technology could also serve hikers, emergency responders, disaster relief workers, and agricultural and field workers. Anyone who needs clean water on the go and far from infrastructure.

The team also sees a potential future where the technology complements large-scale centralized water systems rather than replacing them.

"Our solution cannot be a universal solution for all," Yu acknowledges. "But I think it's an extremely important alternative."

For now, the jacket is still a laboratory prototype, but Yu and Lei are optimistic. With the right industry partnerships, they say, the technology could realistically reach commercial scale within three to five years.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com, written by Natalie Grigson.

Houston ranks among world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems

Startup Status

Long known as the Energy Capital of the World, Houston also ranks among the world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems, according to a new report.

The report from Startup Genome, a research and advisory organization, doesn’t assign a specific numeric ranking to Houston’s startup ecosystem. Rather, it puts Houston in the ranking range of 21 to 30 for emerging ecosystems. Startup Genome weighed factors such as early-stage funding, performance and talent to identify the top emerging ecosystems.

Houston also gained notice for being one of the world’s 20 emerging ecosystems with at least four unicorn startups in the past 10 years. Houston and nine other ecosystems each had four unicorns.

According to StartupBlink, a startup research platform, Houston’s startup ecosystem grew 24 percent in 2025, with over 1,300 startups and total startup funding exceeding $808 million. StartupBlink places Houston at No. 46 among the world’s top 100 startup ecosystems.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, David Horsup, executive in residence at the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, wrote that Houston “has all the ingredients to be wildly successful if it stays true to its differentiated pillars that drive the economy — energy, medical, and aerospace.”

Mumbai topped Startup Genome’s list of emerging ecosystems, followed by Istanbul, Madrid, Salt Lake City-Provo and Barcelona. After Salt Lake City-Provo, the top U.S. ecosystems were Phoenix, Detroit, Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

Silicon Valley led Startup Genome’s ranking of the world’s top established ecosystems, followed by New York City, London, Tel Aviv and Boston. Austin landed at No. 18 in this category and Dallas at No. 27.

“For much of the past decade, this report has chronicled the welcome dispersion of opportunity beyond the traditional hubs,” Startup Genome writes. “That trend has not died — but it has been complicated. Capital and scale are consolidating once more, particularly in the United States, and the gap between leading and emerging ecosystems is widening.”

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