3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Shreyans Chopra of Mstack, Scott Deans of BeOne Sports, and Henal Patel of DocJuris. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: Every week, I introduce you to a handful of Houston innovators to know recently making headlines with news of innovative technology, investment activity, and more. This week's batch includes three Houston startup founders celebrating big wins.

Shreyans Chopra, founder of Mstack

Shreyans Chopra, founder of Mstack, is celebrating the close of his company's $40 million series A. Photo courtesy of Mstack

Houston-based Mstack, whose platform helps manufacturers source specialty chemicals, has raised $40 million in a series A funding round. The company says the infusion of cash will enable it to “double down on its mission to disrupt a historically flawed supply chain for specialty chemicals.”

“This new funding affirms investor confidence in our vision and technology to transform global markets. It enables us to expand geographically and intensify our R&D efforts,” Mstack founder Shreyans Chopra says. Read more.

Scott Deans, co-founder and CEO of BeOne Sports

Rice University's athletic programs will be supported by Houston startup BeOne Sports' technology. Photo via LinkedIn

Rice University — in an effort to enhance athletics and research-driven innovation — has formed a partnership with a startup founded by its alumni.

BeOne Sports, a sports performance technology company developed a platform for mobile motion-capture AI and advanced data analytics, will integrate its technology within Rice's sports medicine and rehabilitation programs.

“BeOne Sports was born from the collaborative environment at Rice, where business leaders and engineers work together to solve real-world problems” Scott Deans, co-founder and CEO of BeOne Sports, says. “Our mission is to provide cutting-edge technology to maximize potential in the simplest, fastest and most versatile ways possible. This partnership with Rice is an exciting step toward democratizing access to sports technology for athletes and coaches at all levels.” Read more.

Henal Patel, founder and CEO of DocJuris

Henal Patel, CEO of DocJurisDocJuris has raised its first round of venture funding to grow its team to keep up with demand for its legal software platform. Photo courtesy of DocJuris

Houston-based DocJuris, a leader in AI contract review, announced the successful closure of its series A funding round by raising $8 million in new capital. This brings the total capital raised to date to $11.2 million.

"DocJuris AI has become an industry-leading platform that empowers enterprise legal, procurement, and sales teams to close deals faster while reducing risk," DocJuris CEO and Founder Henal Patel says in a news release. "With this funding, we will continue scaffolding our platform around generative AI, expand our customer success team, and grow our user base." Read more.

DocJuris has raised a $8 million series A. Photo via Getty Images

Houston legal tech platform raises $8M series A, plans to hire

fresh funding

Houston-based DocJuris, a leader in AI contract review, announced the successful closure of its series A funding round by raising $8 million in new capital. This brings the total capital raised to date to $11.2 million.

"DocJuris AI has become an industry-leading platform that empowers enterprise legal, procurement, and sales teams to close deals faster while reducing risk," DocJuris CEO and Founder Henal Patel says in a news release. "With this funding, we will continue scaffolding our platform around generative AI, expand our customer success team, and grow our user base."

The most active venture capital firm in Texas Silverton Partners led the round with participation from previous investors Watertower Ventures, Surface Ventures, and Seed Round Capital.

Companies like Siemens, Dell, FedEx, Toyota, and Duke Energy already use DocJuris with its AI-powered contract negotiation software that automates imporrant tasks during the review, redlining, and negotiation of contracts. DocJuris uses a platform to screen third-party contracts in seconds, can redline clauses with playbook-compliant edits in one click, and also generate formatted track changes, exception tables, and amendments with a cloud-based application.

The Association of Corporate Counsel, awarded DocJuris the Value Champion Award in 2023 due to the reduced contract cycle times to minutes with AI.

“We wanted to replace repetitive, manual tasks and free up valuable time for our employees to focus on more impactful work,” lead attorney for Flex's Global Procurement and Supply Chain Iringo Csifo-Nagy adds. “To achieve this, we developed a turnkey solution for AI-driven contract reviews together with the DocJuris team."

In its first round of funding in 2021, DocJuris raised $3.2 million in seed capital.

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Henal Patel of DocJuris, Patricia van Ee of Inhance Technologies, and Andrew Bruce of Data Gumbo. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

Editor's note: In the week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three innovators across industries — plastics manufacturing, software, blockchain — recently making headlines.


Henal Patel, CEO of DocJuris

DocJuris has raised its first round of venture funding to grow its team to keep up with demand for its legal software platform. Photo courtesy of DocJuris

Henal Patel, CEO of Houston-based DocJuris, raised his first round of funding without ever having to move from behind his computer screen. The SaaS company founded in 2018 raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by New York-based RTP Seed with additional support from Houston-based Seed Round Capital along with others.

Patel says he was looking for funds as well as support from investors who had experience with software and could open doors to new clients for the legal software.

"Our platform is designed to empower legal, sales, and procurement teams and corporations to negotiate and close contracts with greater speed and precision," Patel says. "The underlying mission is to solve the last-mile of contracting." Click here to read more.

Patricia van Ee, chief commercial officer at Inhance Technologies

Houston-based sustainable plastics manufacturer Inhance Technologies has announced recent growth as business continues to boom. Photo via inhancetechnologies.com

Patricia van Ee has a new role at a growing Houston-based company. The new chief commercial officer at Inhance Technologies just assumed the position in January as the sustainable manufacturer, which transforms conventional plastics into high-performance materials, has opened its new 75,000-square-foot site in St. Louis.

"The expansion in St. Louis is a great moment for the company and a sign of the organization's ambition in sustainable solutions for plastics," van Ee says in a release. "We know consumers are favoring more recyclable plastics, especially in packaging … ." Click here to read more.

Andrew Bruce, CEO and founder of Data Gumbo

Data Gumbo, founded by Andrew Bruce, has launched a new tool for customers focused on transparency and ESG reporting. Photo courtesy of Data Gumbo

Last week, Data Gumbo, provider of GumboNet™, announced its new tool, GumboNet ESG, a sustainability measurement solution that can pull together a company's operational data to ESG standards reporting. The tool incorporates the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board framework for transparency and allows industrial companies access to real-time verifiable environmental performance monitoring.

"GumboNet ESG provides the ability to execute a company's monitoring of sustainability goals over time across their supply chain, providing trustworthy and auditable reports for the market against the credible and widely used SASB standards," says Andrew Bruce, founder and CEO of Data Gumbo, in a news release. "It's a new dawn for reliable and automated environmental impact measurements based on smart contracts powered and secured by blockchain."

Existing Data Gumbo customers will have access to the GumboNet ESG as part of their GumboNet subscription. All GumboNet ESG users can use the ESG tool to provide verified and transparent reporting to their customers, investors, media, and more. Click here to read more.

DocJuris has raised its first round of venture funding to grow its team to keep up with demand for its legal software platform. Image courtesy of DocJuris

Houston B2B software company raises $3.2M in seed funding to grow team and product

money moves

A Houston-based software-as-a-service company that is revolutionizing the contract process has closed a round of funding this week.

DocJuris, founded in 2018, raised $3.2 million in seed funding led by New York-based RTP Seed with additional support from Houston-based Seed Round Capital, California-based Watertower Ventures, Maryland-based Crossbeam, and Remote First Capital.

It's the startup's first round of venture funding and Henal Patel, CEO of DocJuris, says he was looking for funds as well as support from investors who had experience with software and could open doors to new clients for the legal software.

"Our platform is designed to empower legal, sales, and procurement teams and corporations to negotiate and close contracts with greater speed and precision," Patel says. "The underlying mission is to solve the last-mile of contracting."

Henal Patel is CEO of DocJuris. Photo courtesy of DocJuris

The need for funding came at a time of growth, Patel says, as DocJuris was seeing more and more opportunities in light of the pandemic.

"As work has gone more remote, there's a greater need for teams to be able to collaborate on their contracts — instead of sending Word documents over email," he tells InnovationMap.

Within the contract optimization space, Patel says he sees a lot of opportunities for enhancing the experience for lawyers, business owners, contractors, and anyone who has to spend any amount of time on legal papers.

"One of our visions is to — in addition to providing the tactical tools we do to day — revisualize the way that people read contracts," Patel says. "Our platform enables the ability to improve the lives of the people who have to stare at contracts all day."

DocJuris is already hiring for a few positions across sales, customer service, and marketing, and Patel says he will continue to grow his remote team locally.

"We've been remote since before it was cool," Patel says, adding that all but one of his employees is based in Houston. "But we've been locally concentrated in Houston. We're planning on growing our team here in Houston, but keeping the team remote. We believe in Houston."

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Houston residents rank economy as biggest problem, new Kinder survey shows

by the numbers

The region’s economy tops the list of concerns of Houston-area residents surveyed by Rice University’s Kinder Institute for Urban Research.

Respondents in the Kinder Houston Area Survey, which questioned nearly 9,000 residents of Harris, Fort Bend and Montgomery counties, cite the regional economy as the area’s “biggest problem.”

Shrinking confidence in job opportunities and growing household financial pressures fueled the grim economic outlook:

  • The share of residents rating job prospects as “good” or “excellent” fell by more than 25 percentage points, the sharpest single-year decline since the 1980s.
  • Seventy-nine percent of those earning less than $25,000 said they’d be unable to cover an unplanned $400 expense. That was up from 72 percent last year. In the $50,000-to-$99,999 category, the figure was 39 percent, up from 30 percent last year.
  • More than 20 percent of residents said their financial status was worse than it was 12 months earlier.

“These challenges were particularly notable among lower- and middle-earning households,” according to a report about the survey.

Dan Potter, co-director of the institute’s Houston Population Research Center, says the annual survey “provides community leaders and the public with a map of where we’ve been on key issues, where we are now, and what’s of looming importance. It allows everyone to work together toward a better future for our city and our region.”

Houston-based Oxy officially announces CEO transition, names successor

Team Transition

Houston-based Occidental (Oxy) has officially announced its longtime CEO's retirement and her successor.

Oxy shared that Vicki Hollub will retire June 1. Reuters first reported Hollub's plan to retire in March, but a firm date had not been set. Hollub will remain on Oxy's board of directors.

Richard Jackson, who currently serves as Oxy's COO, will replace Hollub in the CEO role.

“It has been a privilege to lead Occidental and work alongside such a talented team for more than 40 years," Hollub shared in a news release. "Following the recently completed decade-long transformation of the company, we now have the best portfolio and the best technical expertise in Occidental’s history. With this strong foundation in place, a clear path forward and a leader like Richard, who has the experience and vision to elevate Occidental, now is the right time for this transition. “I look forward to supporting Richard and the Board through my continued role as a director.”

Hollub has held the top leadership position at Oxy since 2016 and has been with the energy giant for more than 40 years. Before being named CEO, she served as COO and senior executive vice president at the company. She led strategic acquisitions of Anadarko Petroleum in 2019 and CrownRock in 2024, and was the first woman selected to lead a major U.S. oil and gas company.

Hollub also played a key role in leading Oxy's future as a "carbon management company."

Jackson has been with Oxy since 2003. He has held numerous leadership positions, including president of U.S. onshore oil and gas, president of low carbon integrated technologies, general manager of the Permian Delaware Basin and enhanced oil recovery oil and gas, vice president of investor relations, and vice president of drilling Americas.

He was instrumental in launching Oxy Low Carbon Ventures, which focuses DAC, carbon sequestration and low-carbon fuels through businesses like 1PointFive, TerraLithium and others, according to the company. He also serves on the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative’s Climate Investment Board and the American Petroleum Institute’s Upstream Committee. He holds a bachelor's degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M University.

Jackson was named COO of Oxy in October 2025. In his new role as CEO, he will also join the board of directors, effective June 1.

“I am grateful to be appointed President and CEO of Occidental and excited about the opportunity to execute from the strong position and capabilities that we built under Vicki’s leadership,” Jackson added in the release. “It means a lot to me personally to be a part of our Occidental team. I am committed to delivering value from our significant and high-quality resource base. We have a tremendous opportunity to focus on organic improvement and execution to deliver meaningful value for our employees, shareholders and partners.”

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This article first appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice Brain Institute awards seed grants for dementia, Alzheimer’s research

brain trust

The recently established Rice Brain Institute awarded 12 seed grants last month to support research on dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders.

The grants are part of the Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program, which aims to help faculty members generate preliminary data, test and teams that would be supported under the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas.

The DPRIT was approved last year to provide $3 billion in state funding over a 10-year span for research on dementia prevention and other neurological conditions. It will be modeled after the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), which has awarded nearly $4 billion in grants since 2008.

“DPRIT is a historic initiative with transformative impact potential and at Rice we are very well equipped to contribute to its mission and help make Texas a leader in brain health and innovation,” Behnaam Aazhang, a Rice professor of electrical and computer engineering and director of the Neuroengineering Initiative and the RBI, said in a news release.

The Rice DPRIT Seed Grant Program is supported by the RBI and the Educational and Research Initiative for Collaborative Health (ENRICH) office at Rice. Most of the funding came from Rice's Office of Research, with a contribution from Rice's Amyloid Mechanism and Disease Center, which also launched last year.

A number of the teams include collaborators from Houston's Texas Medical Center, including Baylor College of Medicine, University of Texas Medical Branch and the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston.

The 12 teams are:

  • Keya Ghonasgi, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Ghonasgi's research addresses the high risk of falls among people with different types of dementia and aims to develop a personalized, home-based fall-prevention approach using textile-integrated wearable sensors.
  • Luz Garcini, associate professor of psychological sciences at Rice, and Hannah Ballard, associate director of community and public health at the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice. Garcini and Ballard's research looks at barriers and facilitators to early detection of Alzheimer’s disease in diverse, medically underserved urban communities and focuses on populations that experience late diagnosis, including Hispanic/Latino groups.
  • Lei Li, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Pablo Valdes, assistant professor of neurosurgery at UTMB. Li and Valdes' project develops a noninvasive, bedside imaging approach to monitor brain blood flow and oxygenation in patients recovering from stroke or brain surgery using photoacoustic imaging through a specialized transparent skull implant.
  • Cameron Glasscock, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Glasscock's project addresses repeat expansion disorders, such as Huntington’s disease and myotonic dystrophy, and focuses on stopping DNA instability before repeats reach a disease-causing threshold.
  • Raudel Avila, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Rice. Avila's project focuses on everyday health factors such as nutrition, hydration and brain blood flow and how they influence brain aging long before symptoms of dementia appear.
  • Isaac Hilton, associate professor of bioengineering at Rice, and Laura Lavery, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Hilton and Lavery's project uses precise CRISPR-based gene regulation to target multiple genetic drivers of neuronal damage in Alzheimer’s.
  • Quanbing Mou, assistant professor of chemistry at Rice, and Qing-Long Miao, assistant professor of neurology at Baylor College of Medicine. Mou and Miao's project aims to develop a gene-regulation therapy for childhood absence epilepsy by restoring activity of the CACNA1A gene.
  • Momona Yamagami, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Christopher Fagundes, professor of psychological sciences at Rice. Yamagami and Fagundes' project addresses the physical and mental health challenges faced by spouses caring for partners with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias and aims to develop algorithms to determine the optimal timing and frequency of supportive text messages.
  • Han Xiao, professor of chemistry at Rice. Xiao's project aims to improve the delivery of antibody therapies to the brain using a noninvasive, light-based approach that temporarily opens the blood–brain barrier.
  • Lan Luan, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice. Luan's project investigates how tiny blood-vessel injuries in the brain, known as microinfarcts, contribute to dementia.
  • Natasha Kirienko, associate professor of biosciences at Rice. Kirienko's project targets a shared cause of neurodegeneration, impaired mitochondrial cleanup, and aims to identify an existing antidepressant that could be repurposed to protect neurons in diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
  • Harini Iyer, assistant professor of biosciences at Rice. Iyer's project will observe zebrafish to investigate how the brain’s primary immune cells become improperly activated in neurological disorders, leading to the loss of healthy neurons and cognitive impairment.

The RBI also named the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program in January. Read more about those projects here.

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