Houston’s 10 most valuable startups revealed in new report

by the numbers

Houston's top startups by valuation range from e-commerce startups to a geothermal pioneer. Photo via Getty Images

The Greater Houston Partnership has released its list of the 10 most valuable startups that are fueling the city’s growth and entrepreneurial energy, including industry giants like Axiom Space and Fervo Energy.

Currently, Houston hosts more than 1,300 startups in industries such as energy, life sciences, manufacturing and aerospace, according to the GHP. The list ranks its top 10 startups by valuation based on the company’s last private funding round, reflected in Pitchbook data, as of Oct. 20 of this year.

The top 10 list includes:

10. NXTClean Fuels

Valuation: $530 million

NXTClean Fuels builds biofuel refineries that produce renewable fuel by using feedstocks like cooking oil and recycled organic materials.

9. Homebase

Valuation: $660 million

HR tech company Homebase provides employee management software that helps manage and optimize timesheets, payroll and more, with over over 100,000 small businesses and 2 million hourly workers using its product.

8. Zolve

Valuation: $800 million

Zolve is a banking platform that provides customers with access to financial products that aim to be accessible, flexible, and affordable than other financial platforms.

7. Stramsen Biotech

Valuation: $807 million

Stramsen Biotech develops plant-based drug therapies that target both infectious and noninfectious diseases, which include cancer, diabetes, HIV, kidney disease and neurological issues.

6. Octagos

Valuation: $843 million

Healthtech company Octagos has developed a remote cardiac monitoring software driven by AI that helps consolidate patient data in real-time, assisting healthcare professionals in providing quicker, easier and more accurate care.

5. Fervo Energy

Valuation: $1.4 billion

Pioneering geothermal company Fervo Energy combines horizontal drilling and fiber-optic sensing to produce electricity. The company is developing its flagship Cape Station geothermal power project in Utah. The first phase of the project will supply 100 megawatts of power beginning in 2026

4.Cart.com

Valuation: $1.7 billion

Cart.com is an e-commerce giant and logistics solutions provider that was founded in 2020 and obtained unicorn status within just three years.

3. Axiom Space

Valuation: $2.1 billion

Axiom Space is one of the anchor tenants at the Houston Spaceport, and has completed four missions of sending commercial astronauts to the ISS since 2022. In 2027, the company expects to see the first section of its private space station, Axiom Station, launched into low-earth orbit.

2. Solugen

Valuation: $2.175 billion

Solugen replaces petroleum-based products with plant-derived substitutes through its Bioforge manufacturing platform.

1. HighRadius

Valuation: $3.2 billion

HighRadius uses advanced technology to automate and manage accounts receivable processes for businesses worldwide.

The GHP also released its State of Houston’s Tech and Innovation Landscape, which mapped Houston’s digital and innovation sectors. Read the full report here.

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This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Rushi Patel of Homebase, Ashley Gooch of Babynetic, Grace Rodriguez of Impact Hub Houston, and Juliana Garaizar of Energy Tech Nexus. Photos courtesy

4 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

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 a podcast with a tech founder supporting small businesses, a mom designing next-generation bibs, and two energy tech collaborators.

Rushi Patel, co-founder and COO of Homebase

Rushi Patel, co-founder and COO of Homebase, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast in honor of National Small Business Week. Photo courtesy of Homebase

For decades, small businesses have operated in essentially the same manner — handwritten notes to request time off, manual punch cards to clock in, and verbal agreements to swap shifts. And 10 years ago, Houstonian Rushi Patel thought it was time to upgrade these local shops, eateries, and other businesses.

Homebase, which was founded in San Francisco in 2014 and has its largest office in Houston, provides a suite of software tools for employee scheduling, time tracking, communication, and task management for its users, most of which are small businesses.

After a decade of growing its technology and clientbase, Patel, co-founder and COO of the company, explains the unique challenges these small businesses face on the Houston Innovators Podcast — as well as how Homebase helps.

"It's a bit of an orchestra in terms of what entrepreneurs have to do. Your job is to compose a little, but conduct as well," Patel says on the show. "You've built the song of what you want to have happen, but you're conducting lots of different things to make it a reality as a small business owner." Read more.


Ashley Gooch, co-founder of Babynetic

Using a patented magnetic closure, Babynetic's bibs are designed to snap and stay secured while holding up to four pounds of food. Photo courtesy of Babynetic

Ashley Gooch has taken her entrepreneurial spirit from the fitness studio to the finger foods.

The Houston-based founder of high-end cycling studio RYDE and mom of three has launched a new baby gear brand, Babynetic. The company debuted its first product this month: the Babynetic bib.

Using a patented magnetic closure, the colorful platinum-grade silicone bibs are designed to snap and stay secured while holding up to four pounds of food. The snap is intended to be easy for parents to use, but more difficult for messy little hands to remove without assistance.

“As busy moms ourselves juggling careers and with five kids between us, we needed baby gear we could rely on,” Gooch said in a statement.Read more.

​Grace Rodriguez of Impact Hub Houston and Juliana Garaizar of Energy Tech Nexus

Grace Rodriguez (left) and Juliana Garaizar have partnered up — along with their teams — to collaborate on the Equitable Energy Transition Alliance and Lab.

A group of Houston's innovation and energy leaders teamed up to establish an initiative supporting equitability in the energy transition.

Impact Hub Houston, a nonprofit incubator and ecosystem builder, partnered with Energy Tech Nexus to establish the Equitable Energy Transition Alliance and Lab to accelerate startup pilots for underserved communities. The initiative announced that it's won the 2024 U.S. Small Business Administration Growth Accelerator Fund Competition, or GAFC, Stage One award.

"We are incredibly honored to be recognized by the SBA alongside our esteemed partners at Energy Tech Nexus," Grace Rodriguez, co-founder and executive director of Impact Hub Houston, says in a news release. "This award validates our shared commitment to building a robust innovation ecosystem in Houston, especially for solutions that advance the Sustainable Development Goals at the critical intersections of industry, innovation, sustainability, and reducing inequality." Read more.

Rushi Patel, co-founder and COO of Homebase, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast in honor of National Small Business Week. Photo courtesy of Homebase

Houston tech founder shines spotlight on small businesses with new awards initiative

houston innovators podcast episode 234

For decades, small businesses have operated in essentially the same manner — handwritten notes to request time off, manual punch cards to clock in, and verbal agreements to swap shifts. And 10 years ago, Houstonian Rushi Patel thought it was time to upgrade these local shops, eateries, and other businesses.

Homebase, which was founded in San Francisco in 2014 and has its largest office in Houston, provides a suite of software tools for employee scheduling, time tracking, communication, and task management for its users, most of which are small businesses.

After a decade of growing its technology and clientbase, Patel, co-founder and COO of the company, explains the unique challenges these small businesses face on the Houston Innovators Podcast — as well as how Homebase helps.

"It's a bit of an orchestra in terms of what entrepreneurs have to do. Your job is to compose a little, but conduct as well," Patel says on the show. "You've built the song of what you want to have happen, but you're conducting lots of different things to make it a reality as a small business owner."



Patel explains how optimizing these personnel aspects of the business frees up founders and managers and improves the employee experience too. Currently, the job market is competitive for these types of businesses, and retention and hiring are major focus points for entrepreneurs.

With 10 years of data and experience of working with small businesses, Homebase introduced a new awards program this week in honor of National Small Business Week. The inaugural Top Local Workplace Awards honored over 50,000 businesses across the country for a range of positive workplace factors — like pay transparency and employee engagement.

"There are over 2 million employee-centric, main street type of businesses in the United States," Patel says, "these are the restaurants, the retailers, and the service providers. They employ north of 70 million people, so there's a lot of impact that these businesses can have. But what we found was they deserve recognition, and there wasn't recognition for the good practices that these employers were doing."

Using its data, which includes over 2.5 million hourly worker data points, Homebase's team implemented the awards to highlight the companies providing their employees — who are in most cases considered a work family, as Patel says — with a great experience.

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Intuitive Machines lands $600M satellite deal, NASA ‘spacecraft bus’ contract

space deals

Houston-based space infrastructure company Intuitive Machines has scored two astronomical deals.

The deals add to the company’s soaring success. As of June 30, Intuitive Machines had a record-high $1.8 billion backlog of orders, a $1.5 billion increase from the end of last year. The current backlog includes orders for more than 80 spacecraft.

The company, which went public in 2023, expects this year’s revenue to total $900 million to $1 billion. In the first half of 2026, Intuitive Machines generated nearly $393 million in revenue.

Intuitive Machines estimates its total available market is valued at more than $150 billion.

$600 million-plus deal represents ‘important milestone’

On Monday, Intuitive Machines said it picked up a $600 million-plus deal to develop three commercial satellites for an undisclosed customer over the course of about two years.

Intuitive Machines says it will design, manufacture, set up and support several spacecraft “for a critical communications infrastructure mission.”

Steve Altemus, the company’s CEO, says the deal represents “an important milestone for Intuitive Machines and reflects the confidence our customers place in our ability to deliver high-performance spacecraft for a broad range of mission needs.”

Company nails down NASA deal for ‘spacecraft bus’

A day after announcing the $600 million-plus deal, Intuitive Machines said it secured a new contract with NASA.

Intuitive Machines says NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California will use the company’s IM 300 “spacecraft bus” for an EAGLE-VSWIR Earth observation mission. The mission is scheduled to launch in 2028.

Aside from supplying the IM 300 bus, Intuitive Machines will carry out mission support services.

The low-Earth-orbit mission will be equipped with Intuitive Machines’ hyperspectral visible to shortwave infrared (VSWIR) instrument. This technology sees colors and details that aren’t visible to the human eye.

The instrument is “designed to perform surface biology and geology observations from Earth orbit while demonstrating technologies that could support future lunar and Mars exploration missions,” Intuitive Machines says.

Intuitive Machines builds mission-critical spacecraft, systems, and infrastructure for business and government customers. To date, the company has produced more than 300 spacecraft, delivered over 575 pounds of payload to the moon and launched about 100 satellites.

9 Houston-based companies make Fortune Global 500 list in 2026

Worldwide Rankings

Nine Houston companies landed on the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list, which ranks the world's largest corporations by revenue for the 2025 fiscal year.

Houston's showing on the list was led by energy companies, with Spring’s ExxonMobil claiming the top local spot. Here’s what Houston-area companies made the list, and where they ranked:

  • No. 15 ExxonMobil
  • No. 36 Chevron
  • No. 61 Phillip 66
  • No. 159 Sysco
  • No. 243 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 292 Enterprise Products Partners
  • No. 343 Plains GP Holdings
  • No. 460 SLB
  • No. 481 Hewlett Packard Enterprise

After 12 years as No.1, Arkansas-based Walmart was replaced this year by Seattle-based Amazon in the top spot for 2026. Amazon achieved this by bringing in $700 billion in revenue in 2025, representing a 12 percent increase from the previous year.

"Across global business, we see again and again that the leaders who are winning are those who embrace change,” Alyson Shontell, Fortune's editor in chief and chief content officer, said in a news release. "Amazon has topped the Fortune Global 500, knocking Walmart off its pedestal. The company has continually reinvented itself across new businesses and bold bets—including a $200 billion capital commitment, largely to building its capacity for AI and cloud computing, in this year alone."

The U.S. has 141 companies on the 2026 Fortune Global 500 list, which is the most of any country. Companies in America generated $15.5 trillion in aggregate revenues, a 6 percent increase from the previous year.

The number of women CEOs at Fortune Global 500 companies reached a record of 34 top leaders, who represented 6.8 percent of CEOs of companies on the list.

Technology was the standout growth industry on this year’s list, with 38 companies earning revenues that grew 20 percent to about $4 trillion in 2025, with profits climbing 36 percent to $835 billion. The financial sector accounted for the largest share of companies on the list again, with 123 companies in that sector. The energy sector claimed the No. 2 industry spot with 77 companies making the list.

In June, the Fortune 500 list was released, and Texas led the United States with 57 Fortune 500 companies headquartered in the state, generating $2.8 trillion in combined revenue.

Fast-growing Houston real estate startup surges to No. 7 on Inc. 5000

growth report

Houston-based Epique Realty has ridden the AI wave to rank among the Inc. 5000’s 10 fastest-growing private companies.

With three-year revenue growth of 23,210 percent, the AI-powered real estate brokerage appears at No. 7 on this year’s Inc. 5000 list. The 2026 list ranks private companies based on percentage revenue growth from 2022 to 2025.

Epique, founded in 2021, also ranks as the No. 1 fastest-growing company in Houston, No. 1 fastest-growing real estate company in the U.S., and No. 2 fastest-growing company in Texas.

Epique’s annual revenue surpasses $91 million

Between 2022 and 2025, the company’s annual revenue skyrocketed from $391,654 to more than $91.2 million. In 2025, the brokerage closed more than 23,000 deals and surpassed $7 billion in total sales, elevating Epique to the country’s 14th-largest real estate brokerage as measured by volume.

Epique’s network has more than 4,000 agents.

“To debut in the top 10 of the Inc. 5000 is absolute proof that when you relentlessly put agents first, exponential growth takes care of itself,” co-founder and CEO Joshua Miller said in a news release.

“We didn’t achieve this by following the industry playbook; we achieved this by burning it,” Miller added. “By fully funding our agents’ success through free health care, proprietary AI, and world-class leads, we’ve built a company where agents can finally thrive.”

The company’s other co-founders are Chris Miller, chief operating officer and vice president of expansion, and Janice Delci, chief financial officer.

Epique expands business to Canada, Mexico, Australia

The Millers and Delci have guided the company’s rapid expansion.

“Scaling our corporate support team to match [our] hyper-growth while seamlessly expanding across all 50 states and internationally to Canada, Australia, and Mexico takes an incomparable operational infrastructure,” Miller said.

“We have built an enterprise-grade technology ecosystem that allows us to absorb overhead and empower our agents at lightning speed,” he added. “This ranking validates that our disruptive model is working, and it is completely redefining the global industry standard.”

Epique launched its platform in 2023, touting itself as the industry’s first AI-powered brokerage. The startup’s platform provides AI tools for real estate agents to improve their marketing, streamline content creation, and boost engagement with clients and prospects.

Among Epique’s AI tools are:

  • ChatGPT for generation of property descriptions
  • AI-assisted creation of blog posts and agents’ bios
  • Production of Instagram quotes for social media marketing

“When we started Epique, we wanted to build a company that genuinely cared for its agents’ financial and physical well-being,” Delci says. “To see that vision translate into this level of historic record-breaking growth is a beautiful testament to the true power of radical generosity.”

Epique and fellow honorees will be recognized Oct. 14-16 at the 2026 Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala in Dallas.

Six other Houston-area companies land in top 250

Here are the six other Houston-area companies that claimed spots in the top 250 on the Inc. 5000 list. Each company name is followed by its ranking, headquarters city, and three-year growth rate.

  • No. 27 Empact Technologies, 8,275 percent
  • No. 60 Action1, 4,512 percent
  • No 75 Signs By G, 3,684 percent
  • No. 79 The ’Pause Life, 3,469 percent (Galveston)
  • No. 110 Turtlebox Audio, 2,576 percent
  • No. 178 Dahnani Private Equity Group, 1,904 percent (Stafford)

How did companies in Texas’ other major metros fare?

Here’s a breakdown of companies in the Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, and San Antonio areas that made the top 250 on the Inc. 5000. Again, each company name is followed by its ranking, headquarters city, and three-year growth rate.

Austin (10 companies)

  • No. 9 Investment Watches, 15,741 percent
  • No. 72 Razor Metrics, 3,856 percent
  • No. 91 Autonomize AI, 2,921 percent
  • No. 102 Choose Your Horizon, 2,719 percent
  • No. 132 Wander Staffing, 2,296 percent
  • No. 144 Everyday Dose, 2,179 percent
  • No. 148 NetRise, 2,118 percent
  • No. 163 Nutrabound Labs, 1,999 percent (Bastrop)
  • No. 179 Steadily, 1,890 percent
  • No. 208 Tiny Health, 1,624 percent

Dallas-Fort Worth (11 companies)

  • No. 3 Yantran, 258,740 percent (Allen)
  • No. 12 Paek Management Group, 12,520 percent (Irving)
  • No. 82 Elite Robotics and Automation, 3,334 percent (Fort Worth)
  • No. 133 Outamation, 2,291 percent (Southlake)
  • No. 147 Red Creek Solutions, 2,119 percent (Frisco)
  • No. 155 JobTread Software, 2,071 percent (Dallas)
  • No. 164 DAX Eyewear, 1,977 percent (Nevada)
  • No. 186 Optimized Waste Removal, 1,830 percent (Fort Worth)
  • No. 204 Freight Flex, 1,642 percent (Denton)
  • No. 212 Maverick Power, 1,591 percent (McKinney)
  • No. 229 Innovative Life Sciences, 1,494 percent (McKinney)

San Antonio (one company)

  • No. 118 Hire With Near, 2,421 percent
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