Houston innovator calls for collaboration from energy tech community

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 226

Scott Gale, executive director of Halliburton Labs, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share his call to action for Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week. Photo courtesy of Halliburton Labs

Scott Gale will be the first to admit that hosting a week of curated events targeted to a group of individuals within the tech and energy space isn't a novel idea — Climate Week NYC has been taking over Manhattan for over a decade. But Gale believes Houston deserves to have its own time to shine.

Earlier this month, Halliburton Labs, Rice Alliance, and Greentown Houston announced the inaugural Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week 2024 to take place in September, but Gale, executive director of Halliburton Labs, says he hopes this is just the beginning of Houston organizations coming together to collaborate on the initiative.

"I think we have a really awesome initial coalition. Whether your the fifth company or organization to raise its hand to do something that week or the 50th — it really doesn't matter," Gale says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "It really is an open invitation — and I want to make that super clear."



Gale says that he's looked at some of the successful week-long events — like SXSW and others — and the key factors are calendar coordination and cross promotion. Now that Houston has the week set — September 9 to 13, 2024 — it's time for everyone to fill that week with a density of events anywhere around Houston to showcase the city's innovative energy community.

Those interested can learn more or submit their event information online.

The initiative falls in line with how Gale has led Halliburton Labs from its early days in 2020 to now with a focus on community. While the corporate world always needs eyes on its return on investment, supporting the innovation ecosystem has been a bit of a leap of faith – and it always will be.

"There's always this idea of having a line of sight to the outcomes (of your investment). And when you're interfacing with or investing in the startup community, you don't have the benefit of line of sight. A lot of the things that are being solved for are just too early stage. And that can be really hard for corporates to wrap their heads around," Gale says.

"One of the things that we got to was this idea that you can invest in the startup community, and you don't know where the returns will come from, but you know they will come," he continues.

Emma Konet, co-founder and CTO of Tierra Climate, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast. Photo via LinkedIn

Meet the Houston innovator who's creating a new market for decarbonizing energy storage

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 225

If the energy transition is going to be successful, the energy storage space needs to be equipped to support both the increased volume of energy needed and new energies. And Emma Konet and her software company, Tierra Climate, are targeting one part of the equation: the market.

"To me, it's very clear that we need to build a lot of energy storage in order to transition the grid," Konet says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "The problems that I saw were really on the market side of things."

Konet says she was bullish on the energy storage side of things when she was an early hire at Key Capture Energy, a private equity-backed energy storage project developer. The issue with energy storage projects, as Konet describes, is they aren't being monetized properly and, in some cases, aren't sustainable and increasing emissions.

"The product we're building is solving these problems. It's a financial product, but what it's doing is solving a market deficiency," she says. "We're sending the right signal to the battery to operate in a way that reduces emissions, and then we're paying them for it because there's a demand to decarbonize."

For over a year, Konet, as co-founder and CTO, has worked on the platform, which is essentially a marketplace for corporates to buy carbon offsets, incentifying and monetizing storage projects.

Tierra Climate is technology agnostic, so while the company is seeing activity in the battery space, they can also work with other types of storage — like hydrogen, pumped water, and more. Konet says her ideal customers are companies with money and interest in playing a role in the energy transition and looking to offset their scope two and three emissions.

"The ultimate vision for our company is for this to be an accessible product that has a high degree of integrity that small to very large companies can execute on, because it's a pay-per-performance mechanism that doesn't lock companies into a really large contract," she says. "It's really scalable."

This year, she says the company, which won fourth place in the 2023 Rice Business Plan Competition, is focused on securing its first big contract and fundraising for its seed round.

David Pruner, executive director of TEX-E, joins the Houston Innovator Podcast. Photo via LinkedIn

This Houston innovator's statewide mission to advance energy transition innovation on college campuses

houston innovators podcast episode 224

Collaboration is the name of the game for David Pruner, executive director of the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy, known as TEX-E, a nonprofit housed out of Greentown Labs that was established to support energy transition innovation at Texas universities.

TEX-E launched in 2022 in collaboration with Greentown Labs, MIT’s Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, and five university partners — Rice University, Texas A&M University, Prairie View A&M University, University of Houston, and The University of Texas at Austin.

Pruner was officially named to his role earlier this year, but he's been working behind the scenes for months now getting to know the organization and already expanding its opportunities from students across the state at the five institutions.

"In the end, we have five different family members who need to be coordinated differently," Pruner says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "There's plenty of bright students at each of these schools, and there's plenty of innovation going on, it's whether it can grow, prosper, and be sustainable."

Pruner describes the organization as pulling the best resources from each of the schools, with TEX-E operating as a bit of a matchmaker to connect students across the state through in-person opportunities and its digital platform.

"Our main job is to look to connect everyone, so that an engineer at Texas A&M that has an idea that they want to pursue, but they don't know the business side, can meet that Rice MBA," Pruner says, giving a hypothetical example. "Then, when they realize it's going to be a highly regulated product, we need a regulatory lawyer at UT — we can make all that happen and connect them."

TEX-E's programming includes a bootcamp course, fellowship opportunities at each school, and an annual startup competition at CERAWeek with $50,000 of pre-seed funding up for grabs. Next year, as Pruner explains on the show, the organization will also roll out an accelerator.

Pruner shares more about the program and its future, as well as his views on Houston as a major leader for the energy transition.

Omair Tariq of Cart.com joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share his confidence in Houston as the right place to scale his unicorn. Photo via Cart.com

Houston innovator bets on Bayou City to scale fast-growing unicorn tech co.

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 223

Last November, Houston-founded logistics tech company Cart.com announced that it would be returning its headquarters to Houston after spending the last two years growing in Austin. But Co-Founder and CEO Omair Tariq says that while the corporate address may have changed, he actually never left.

"I've been in Houston now forever — and I don't think I'm planning on leaving anytime soon. I love Houston — this city has given me everything I have," Tariq says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "I even love the traffic and everything people hate about Houston."

Tariq, who was born in Pakistan and grew up in Dubai before relocating as a teen to Houston, shared his entrepreneurial journey on the show, which included starting a jewelry business and being an early employee at Blinds.com before it was acquired in 2014 by Home Depot.

"For me to build something here was always a priority," Tariq says. He founded Cart.com in 2020.

He explains that the initial HQ relocation to Austin in 2021 was more of a co-location between the two Texas cities that was motivated by an increase in Austin activity for investors and potential customers for Cart.com.

"Austin was doing a really good job of branding itself as being the city in Texas to come to when you think about innovation or technology," Tariq says. "What we learned was that as we were building our own brand of being a technology company and being a company that wanted to gain global and at least national credibility, we thought that if we're closer to the action happening in Austin, we would get there faster."

Since the relocation, Cart.com raised a $60 million series C and grown its customer base to over 6,000 users. After making several acquisitions, the company also operates 14 fulfillment centers nationwide.

"I think Austin served its purpose. It certainly allowed us to be in the limelight in all the right ways, and I'm grateful for it," Tariq says. "But once we got to a point, once we closed our series C round and became a unicorn ... I think we're now at a scale where the infrastructure that Houston provides is probably something that will be more attractive and useful for us in the long term."

And Tariq adds on the show that he feels confident that he knows Houston well, and knows it is the right place to continue Cart.com's growth, which he says hopes includes 10 times the brands supported, a global footprint, and potentially an IPO.

Procyrion has announced the closing of its series E round of funding. Photo via Getty Images

Houston medical device company secures $57.7M to fund journey to FDA approval, commercialization

fresh funding

Houston-born and bred medical device company, Procyrion, has completed its series E with a raise of $57.7 million, including the conversion of $10 million of interim financing.

Procyrion is the company behind Aortix, a pump designed to be placed in the descending thoracic aorta of heart failure patients, which has been shown to improve cardiac performance in seriously ill subjects. The money raised will allow the company to proceed with a the DRAIN-HF Study, a pivotal trial that will be used for eventual FDA approval and commercialization.

The Aortix is the brainchild of Houston cardiologist Reynolds Delgado. According to Procyrion’s CSO, Jace Heuring, Delgado, gained some of his experience with devices for the heart working with legendary Texas Heart Institute surgeon O.H. “Bud” Frazier. He filed his first patents related to the Aortix in 2005.

Heuring says that the first prototypes were built in 2011, followed by the final design in 2018. CEO Eric Fain, a California-based MD and with more than 30 years in the medical device industry, joined the company in 2018 ahead of the final design, primed to bring Aortix to the public. He visits the company’s Houston headquarters, across the street from Central Market, on a regular basis.

The device’s pilot study of 18 patients was completed in 2022. Those encouraging results paved the way for the current study, which will include an enrollment of 134 patients. The randomized study will seek to treat patients with acute decompensated heart failure. Half will be treated with standard-of-care therapy, the other half will be catheterized with an Aortix pump. A separate arm of the study will seek to treat end-stage heart failure patients who would otherwise be deemed too sick for either a transplant or an LVAD permanent pump. Fort-five healthcare centers in the United States will participate, including Texas Heart Institute.

“One of the key characteristics is [the patients] are retaining a lot of fluid,” explains Heuring in a video interview. “And when I say a lot, I mean it could be 25 or 30 or 40 pounds of fluid or more. When we put our pump in, one of the main goals is to reduce that fluid load.”

On average, about 11 liters of fluid came off of each patient. Many of those end-stage patients had previously been considered for both a heart and kidney transplant, but after using the Aortix, their kidneys responded so well that they were able to get only the heart transplant.

“These patients really are in dire straits and come into the hospital and today the only proven therapy to help these patients is to administer high doses of intravenous diuretic and some other cardiac drugs and in about 25 percent of patients those therapies are ineffective,” says Fain.

If Aortix gains approval, these sickest of the sick, usually consigned to hospice care, will have hope.

Thanks to the Series E, led by Houston’s Fannin Partners, returning investors, including Bluebird Ventures, the Aortix is inching closer to commercialization. Besides funding the DRAIN-HR study, Procyrion will also use the funds for internal programs to improve product manufacturability. One more step towards meaning advanced heart failure may not always be a death sentence.

Last month, Atul Varadhachary, managing director of Fannin, joined the Houston Innovators Podcast and alluded to Procyrion's raise. The company was born out of Fannin and still resides in the same building as Fannin.

Aortix is a pump designed to be placed in the descending thoracic aorta of heart failure patients. Photo via Procyrion

Atul Varadhachary of Fannin joins the Houston Innovators Podcast. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston innovator plays the long game of life science innovation with optimized capital efficiency

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 222

Commercializing a life science innovation that has the potential to enhance or even save the lives of millions of patients is a marathon, not a sprint. That's how Atul Varadhachary thinks of it, and he's leading an organization that's actively running that race for several different early-stage innovations.

For over a decade, Fannin has worked diligently to develop promising life science innovations — that start as just an idea or research subject — by garnering grant funding and using its team of expert product developers to build out the technology or treatment. The model is different from what you'd see at an accelerator or incubator, and it also varies from the path taken by an academic or research institution.

The life science innovation timeline is very different from a software startup's, which can get to an early prototype in less than a year.

"In biotech, to get to that minimally viable product, it can take a decade and tens of millions of dollars," Varadhachary, managing director at Fannin, says on the Houston Innovators Podcast.



Fannin addresses what Varadhachary calls a twin bottleneck in Houston's life science innovation ecosystem. Not only does Houston not attract the funding biotech startups need desperately to grow their companies, but hiring is a major issue as the city isn't home to an established labor pool of experienced product developers within the industry.

"The challenge is that product development is more complex — it requires innovation, but that's not sufficient. When you ask people why we lag in the product development in the life sciences — although we are home to the largest medical center in the country, we don't even make list of top 10 biotech clusters — the usual answer is that we don't have enough biotech investors," Varadhachary says.

"But that puts the cart before the horse," he continues. "Investors invest in people not just ideas. Although we have an amazing pool of researchers and clinicians, we lack experienced product developers."

In more ways than one, Fannin is addressing this problem. For all of its several ongoing programs, Fannin acts as the leadership team for the technologies. Its core employees — there are about 20 currently — work on all of the companies, which are developing a range life science innovations, from Brevitest, a point-of-use immunoassay platform, to Procyrion, an intra-aortic pump for congestive heart failure patients.

Fannin's programs also range in stage, which Varadhachary outlines on the show to be three different phases. The earliest stage programs will have Fannin's team working directly on early testing, product development, and grant writing, while the later stage programs will have built out a dedicated team and raise venture investment.

Another way Fannin is addressing Houston's lack of life science product developers is through its Fannin Talent Development Program, which has given around 350 individuals an opportunity to gain critical product development experience.

With 10 years under its belt, Fannin — as well as the greater Houston life science innovation ecosystem — is at a point where it can soon produce exits needed to firm up Houston as a life science leader.

"Clearly, we've got the base elements required to be a successful ecosystem, and they continue to grow," Varadhachary says of Houston. "Typically you need one or two really big success stories — especially if those success stories result in a company being sold, leaving behind experienced product developers with money in their pockets — that's often what will supercharge the next cycle of development. I'm hoping that will happen in Houston in the next five years, decade, or so."

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Texas approves land-swapping deal with SpaceX as company hopes to expand rocket-launch operations

making a trade

SpaceX would acquire public land in Texas to expand its rocket-launch facilities under a tentative deal that is moving forward after months of opposition from nearby residents and officials near the U.S.-Mexico border.

The tentative land-swapping deal moved forward this week when the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission unanimously voted in favor of swapping 43 noncontiguous acres from Boca Chica State Park with SpaceX, which would give the state 477 acres about 10 miles south of the park near Brownsville, Texas.

Some of the 43 contested acres are landlocked with no public access but with protected plant and animal species. Although SpaceX is proposing swapping the public land for 477 acres, it has not yet purchased that property. None of the land in the deal has beach access, but the 43 acres sit near protected federal land and lagoons that stretch along the coast.

“Through this transaction we are guaranteeing the conservation of 477 acres, which would otherwise potentially be developed into condominiums or strip centers,” Jeffery D. Hildebrand, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission chairman appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, said at the meeting's close.

The deal started in 2019 as a conversation between the state and SpaceX. But it was finally worked out in 2023, said David Yoskowitz, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's executive director.

People sent over 2,300 letters to the department to voice their opinion. Although the majority, 60%, were opposed, the department recommended the state vote in favor of the deal, which had the support from the Democratic state senator for the area, the comptroller and the Texas General Land Office commissioner.

Dozens of people traveled up to the Monday's meeting in the state capital of Austin to voice their support or discontent with the plan.

Cyrus Reed, the legislative and conservation director with the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club, was among those opposing the deal.

“We think, as an alternative, if we think the 477 acres are valuable, go and buy it. We the voters of Texas have given you money to purchase valuable land," Reed said, referring to the state's Centennial Parks Conservation Fund.

In November, voters approved the establishment of the fund, creating the largest endowment for park development in Texas history.

“And remember the precedent you’re setting," Reed said. "If you approve this deal, that means every industrialist, everyone who has an interest in expanding is going to look at this and say, ‘Where can I go find some land that I can exchange to continue to pollute and hurt other land?’ So, that’s not a net benefit for Texas.”

SpaceX Starbase general manager Kathryn Lueders attended the meeting and said she has seen wildlife coexist with spacecraft in Florida when she worked as a program manager for NASA.

“At the same time, it further expands on a critical refuge and allows Texans to receive a coveted property which has been sought by multiple state and federal agencies for conservation efforts for over a decade,” she said.

An environmental assessment, public comment period and other consultations could mean the disposition of the property could take up to 18 months to complete, according to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department's general counsel.

Podcast: The Houston founder's guide to navigating SXSW 2024

houston innovators podcast episode 227

Tens of thousands of people are descending upon Austin for SXSW — many of whom are ambitious startup founders. For Houston entrepreneurs, there's a lot to consider before heading down the street to Austin, and Marc Nathan can help.

The native Houstonian, who works with startups as senior director of market development at Michael Best and is based in Austin, has attended the conference for over 20 years. Every year, he assembles a comprehensive SXSW guide including round up of must-attend events, tips, and more.

He joined the Houston Innovators Podcast this week to provide his thoughts on how Houston founders can make the most of the tech-focused Interactive track — or the unofficial experiences taking place around Austin.

"You do not need a badge to enjoy and get the most out of SXSW," Nathan says, explaining that having a badge is ideal for a first timer experience. "For struggling founders who are typically broke, if you can swing the travel to get to Austin — getting here, staying here, and eating here, which are all not very cheap to start with — if you can swing that, then a badge is not that critical."

He also reminds founders that getting an invite to speak on a panel, pitch in the competition, or volunteering can score you a free or discounted badge.

On the show, Nathan shares more tips — from registering to everything you're even remotely interested in to making sure you have on your comfiest walking shoes and bring your external phone charger — on the podcast, but explains that there's really one big mistake new SXSW attendees should avoid.

"The biggest mistake I see year after year — and it's really an entrepreneur problem — but don't be too sales-y. Listen before you talk," Nathan says. "Everybody at SX is going to get it — they are going to understand the language you're speaking. It's not like explaining what your startup is to your 80-year-old grandmother. But you gotta give them a reason and a way to help you."

Headed out to SXSW? Here are a few Houston-focused events to attend.

March 9 - A $20 Trillion Challenge: Financing the Energy Transition (badge required)

A couple of Houstonians join the panel of a topic that is very prevalent in the energy capital of the world: funding of the energy transition. Juliana Garaizar joins the conversation on Saturday, March 9, at 4 pm.

March 10 - How NASA Supports Startups and Individuals to Collaborate on its Mission (badge required)

Last month, a Houston tech company launched a lunar lander in collaboration with NASA — and that's just one of countless examples of NASA's work with tech and startup companies. Join NASA for a panel discussing innovative partnerships on Sunday, March 10, at 4 pm.

March 11 - Houston House @ SXSW 2024 (badge required)

On Monday, March 11, at the LINE Hotel, the Greater Houston Partnership is hosting four panels and a happy hour. More info on the full-day event, which features over a dozen Houston-based experts, startup founders, and more, is available online.

March 12 - Women in VC Breakfast (registration required)

Houston Women in VC and Austin Women in VC are teaming up to host a breakfast with partners JP Morgan Chase and Born Global Ventures for all the female investors headed to SXSW on Tuesday, March 12, at 9 am. Request your registration online.