Houston company moves to suburb for $4M new HQ

headed southwest

The Sugar Land Office of Economic Development and Tourism arranged financial incentives and financing options for the new headquarters. Photo via sugarlandecodev.com

Frazer, a manufacturer of emergency vehicles, is shifting its headquarters from Houston to Sugar Land — a move that will bring 286 jobs to the Fort Bend County suburb.

The company plans to invest $4 million in its new headquarters, a two-story, 23-year-old facility that it’s leasing from CVH Capital Partners. The previous tenant was Thermo Fisher Scientific. The building, at 1410 Gillingham Ln., encompasses 150,000 square feet.

Frazer’s current headquarters is at 7219 Rampart St., near the intersection of Bissonnet Street and Renwick Drive.

“Being just minutes outside of Houston, Sugar Land has always been on our radar,” Laura Griffin, CEO of Frazer, says in a news release. “It’s home to a growing business environment, a robust workforce, and reliable infrastructure. It’s an ideal destination for us to grow and serve our customers.”

The Sugar Land Office of Economic Development and Tourism arranged financial incentives and financing options for the new headquarters.

“We are committed to boosting our business community and empowering our workforce by fostering business relationships,” says Elizabeth Huff, executive director of the economic development office. “Frazer’s expansion is proof of our success in this endeavor.”

Frazer, founded in 1956, makes and sells mobile clinics, mobile stroke units, and ambulances for fire departments and emergency services providers. Houston-area customers include Texas Children’s Hospital, UTHealth Houston, the Bellaire Fire Department, the Harris County Hospital District, the Houston Fire Department, and the Montgomery County Hospital District.

Healthiby's motto is "health is wealth." Getty Images

Houston health and wellness startup uses money as a motivator for lifestyle changes

health is wealth

Everything is different when money is on the line, and a Houston startup is using financial incentives as a motivator for its users to make smart, healthy lifestyle changes to enhance their wellness.

Healthiby, a cost-effective wellness program, is changing the game of health solutions by addressing chronic and pre-chronic conditions through innovative prevention and management methods, all incentivized by both short-term and long-term financial benefits.

"Healthiby incentivizes and empowers people to achieve better health outcomes in a team context," says Mary Beth Snodgrass, managing director and co-founder. "We're different from other wellness solutions because we're focused on changing habits, as well as incentivizing better health outcomes, providing both immediate and long-term rewards."

The company launched in May 2019 and is still in its pilot stage. Snodgrass and co-founder Dr. Tristan Hartzell, a surgeon based in Nebraska, have remained committed to their foundational concept for their startup, which is to empower people on their wellness journeys and spread knowledge about the financial benefits of leading a healthy lifestyle.

Mary Beth Snodgrass (pictured) founded Healthiby with Nebraska-based surgeon Dr. Tristan Hartzell. Photo courtesy of Healthiby.

Healthiby's notion that "health is wealth" relates to the idea that engaging in a healthy lifestyle will ultimately benefit individuals financially long-term, as healthcare costs can be avoided. Essentially, Healthiby qualifies health goals as preventative measures for chronic and pre-chronic diseases. Not only does Healthiby inform its users about the long-term financial benefits of healthy living, the program introduces exciting contests in which users are eligible to win financial rewards if they meet certain health-related criteria.

In time for the start of the new year and the health-related resolutions buzz, Healthiby enacts their user-friendly digital software application, social programs, expert health advice and financial incentives to serve their goal-oriented consumers with an engaging health management regiment that is sure to keep them on track throughout the year.

"What we're really focused on this year is, in addition to our incentives, digital content and coach guidance, is making sure that participants are engaging among themselves," Snodgrass tells InnovationMap. "Science shows there are benefits to surrounding yourself with other people who share similar health goals."

In what the program's founders refer to as a "wellness rewards solution," users are able to tap into the Healthiby digital platform to track their progress, participate in social wellness groups, invest in long-term financial incentives and access digestible, cutting edge wellness literature; all components of Healthiby's "journey goals," the program's building blocks to achieving a healthy lifestyle.

"Our software application manages our contests and our rewards, but we also have a very social component, in which participants are meeting online regularly with a dietician coach," Snodgrass explains. "The reason for this is because when we're talking about chronic and pre-chronic conditions, it's important for people to have a strong understanding of how these issues affect the body and what kinds of lifestyle changes are most effective at helping people better manage or reverse them."

Photo courtesy of Healthiby

For an annual minimum of $8 each month, individual consumers have the opportunity to invest in their own long-term wellness through this interactive, user-friendly health progress program.

"Healthiby is providing a really low cost solution for people to get additional social motivation, information, and incentives so that they can stick with their goals throughout the year," Snodgrass said.

Healthiby is currently available to individual consumers in Texas, but its founders have their sights set on expanding the business and sharing their solutions to companies vested in the importance of healthy living for their employees. For now, Houston's health and wellness consumers just got richer — both physically and financially — when Healthiby opened its digital doors to the city.

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Houston scientists develop breakthrough AI-driven process to design, decode genetic circuits

biotech breakthrough

Researchers at Rice University have developed an innovative process that uses artificial intelligence to better understand complex genetic circuits.

A study, published in the journal Nature, shows how the new technique, known as “Combining Long- and Short-range Sequencing to Investigate Genetic Complexity,” or CLASSIC, can generate and test millions of DNA designs at the same time, which, according to Rice.

The work was led by Rice’s Caleb Bashor, deputy director for the Rice Synthetic Biology Institute and member of the Ken Kennedy Institute. Bashor has been working with Kshitij Rai and Ronan O’Connell, co-first authors on the study, on the CLASSIC for over four years, according to a news release.

“Our work is the first demonstration that you can use AI for designing these circuits,” Bashor said in the release.

Genetic circuits program cells to perform specific functions. Finding the circuit that matches a desired function or performance "can be like looking for a needle in a haystack," Bashor explained. This work looked to find a solution to this long-standing challenge in synthetic biology.

First, the team developed a library of proof-of-concept genetic circuits. It then pooled the circuits and inserted them into human cells. Next, they used long-read and short-read DNA sequencing to create "a master map" that linked each circuit to how it performed.

The data was then used to train AI and machine learning models to analyze circuits and make accurate predictions for how untested circuits might perform.

“We end up with measurements for a lot of the possible designs but not all of them, and that is where building the (machine learning) model comes in,” O’Connell explained in the release. “We use the data to train a model that can understand this landscape and predict things we were not able to generate data on.”

Ultimately, the researchers believe the circuit characterization and AI-driven understanding can speed up synthetic biology, lead to faster development of biotechnology and potentially support more cell-based therapy breakthroughs by shedding new light on how gene circuits behave, according to Rice.

“We think AI/ML-driven design is the future of synthetic biology,” Bashor added in the release. “As we collect more data using CLASSIC, we can train more complex models to make predictions for how to design even more sophisticated and useful cellular biotechnology.”

The team at Rice also worked with Pankaj Mehta’s group in the department of physics at Boston University and Todd Treangen’s group in Rice’s computer science department. Research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Office of Naval Research, the Robert J. Kleberg Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation, the American Heart Association, National Library of Medicine, the National Science Foundation, Rice’s Ken Kennedy Institute and the Rice Institute of Synthetic Biology.

James Collins, a biomedical engineer at MIT who helped establish synthetic biology as a field, added that CLASSIC is a new, defining milestone.

“Twenty-five years ago, those early circuits showed that we could program living cells, but they were built one at a time, each requiring months of tuning,” said Collins, who was one of the inventors of the toggle switch. “Bashor and colleagues have now delivered a transformative leap: CLASSIC brings high-throughput engineering to gene circuit design, allowing exploration of combinatorial spaces that were previously out of reach. Their platform doesn’t just accelerate the design-build-test-learn cycle; it redefines its scale, marking a new era of data-driven synthetic biology.”

Axiom Space wins NASA contract for fifth private mission, lands $350M in financing

ready for takeoff

Editor's note: This story has been updated to include information about Axiom's recent funding.

Axiom Space, a Houston-based space infrastructure company that’s developing the first commercial space station, has forged a deal with NASA to carry out the fifth civilian-staffed mission to the International Space Station.

Axiom Mission 5 is scheduled to launch in January 2027, at the earliest, from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The crew of non-government astronauts is expected to spend up to 14 days docked at the International Space Station (ISS). Various science and research activities will take place during the mission.

The crew for the upcoming mission hasn’t been announced. Previous Axiom missions were commanded by retired NASA astronauts Michael López-Alegría, the company’s chief astronaut, and Peggy Whitson, the company’s vice president of human spaceflight.

“All four previous [Axiom] missions have expanded the global community of space explorers, diversifying scientific investigations in microgravity, and providing significant insight that is benefiting the development of our next-generation space station, Axiom Station,” Jonathan Cirtain, president and CEO of Axiom, said in a news release.

As part of Axiom’s new contract with NASA, Voyager Technologies will provide payload services for Axiom’s fifth mission. Voyager, a defense, national security, and space technology company, recently announced a four-year, $24.5 million contract with NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston to provide mission management services for the ISS.

Axiom also announced today, Feb. 12, that it has secured $350 million in a financing round led by Type One Ventures and Qatar Investment Authority.

The company shared in a news release that the funding will support the continued development of its commercial space station, known as Axiom Station, and the production of its Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit (AxEMU) under its NASA spacesuit contract.

NASA awarded Axiom a contract in January 2020 to create Axiom Station. The project is currently underway.

"Axiom Space isn’t just building hardware, it’s building the backbone of humanity’s next era in orbit," Tarek Waked, Founding General Partner at Type One Ventures, said in a news release. "Their rare combination of execution, government trust, and global partnerships positions them as the clear successor-architect for life after the ISS. This is how the United States continues to lead in space.”

Houston edtech company closes oversubscribed $3M seed round

fresh funding

Houston-based edtech company TrueLeap Inc. closed an oversubscribed seed round last month.

The $3.3 million round was led by Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, a venture capital firm based in Houston. Gamper Ventures, another Houston firm, also participated with additional strategic partners.

TrueLeap reports that the funding will support the large-scale rollout of its "edge AI, integrated learning systems and last-mile broadband across underserved communities."

“The last mile is where most digital transformation efforts break down,” Sandip Bordoloi, CEO and president of TrueLeap, said in a news release. “TrueLeap was built to operate where bandwidth is limited, power is unreliable, and institutions need real systems—not pilots. This round allows us to scale infrastructure that actually works on the ground.”

True Leap works to address the digital divide in education through its AI-powered education, workforce systems and digital services that are designed for underserved and low-connectivity communities.

The company has created infrastructure in Africa, India and rural America. Just this week, it announced an agreement with the City of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo to deploy a digital twin platform for its public education system that will allow provincial leaders to manage enrollment, staffing, infrastructure and performance with live data.

“What sets TrueLeap apart is their infrastructure mindset,” Joe Swinbank, General Partner at Joe Swinbank Family Limited Partnership, added in the news release. “They are building the physical and digital rails that allow entire ecosystems to function. The convergence of edge compute, connectivity, and services makes this a compelling global infrastructure opportunity.”

TrueLeap was founded by Bordoloi and Sunny Zhang and developed out of Born Global Ventures, a Houston venture studio focused on advancing immigrant-founded technology. It closed an oversubscribed pre-seed in 2024.

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