Houston sports tech startup aims to optimize unsold resale ticket market with new platform

game on

Looking to score the best deal on your next game ticket? A new Houston-founded app promises to revolutionize the resale market. Photo via Getty Images

Online platforms have long simplified the process of buying, selling, and trading event tickets. But what happens when your tickets don’t sell or when you’re stuck with costly season tickets you can’t use? You might end up giving them away or leaving them unused, leading to a financial loss either way.

This is the challenge that Houstonian Jerin Varkey is willing to address with Offer Approved, a new platform that empowers sellers and buyers, guaranteeing that no seat goes unused.

The idea took root around two years ago when Varkey, a passionate sports fan and season ticket holder, faced a new challenge. After becoming a parent, he found himself unable to attend every game. Frustrated with traditional resale platforms, he quickly realized that high fees and limited time made it difficult to sell all his tickets, causing him to lose money each time.

"I knew there was someone out there willing to pay $50," he recalls.

A transparent market for resale tickets


Offer Approved is a transparent and trusted platform for both sellers and buyers. Screenshots courtesy of Offer Approved

With this idea in mind, he started intensive research through 2023, identifying the multiple inefficiencies in the ticket market, including seeing the same seat in different marketplaces simultaneously.

“You’ll go through the checkout process and discover that those seats are no longer available; what happens is somebody bought it a few seconds before you on a different site, and the new system is taking it down," Varkey tells InnovationMap.

Scams, falsification, and security flaws were also among the problems. Offer Approved aims to fix these gaps by offering a transparent and trusted platform for both sellers and buyers, specifically to season ticket holders who leave several seats empty at stadiums each night.

“Sellers now have better visibility into the market, and we assist them in managing their listings," Varkey explains. "If a ticket is listed at $100, the seller can set a hidden minimum price of $80 or $70. Any offer that meets or exceeds that amount is automatically accepted, saving them the hassle of manually adjusting prices each time.”

A business model focused on sustainable growth

Varkey initially partnered with angel investors to bring the developer and a technical team. He prefers to avoid paid advertising, opting instead for a more sustainable business approach, including a small fee for sellers and a service charge for managing season tickets.

The project is currently self-funded, and Varkey is focused on ensuring long-term sustainability.

"I'm perfectly fine with taking things slowly. My priority is to make sure the model is sound first," he says.

Offer Approved is currently seeking season ticket holders and partnerships to build supply. He has also been in conversations with Toyota Center, NRG Stadium, and Minute Maid Park and their sports teams.

From corporate worker to visionary founder

Jerin Varkey founded Offer Approved to target unsold resale tickets to sporting events. Photo courtesy of Offer Approved

Varkey’s entrepreneurial journey started in the corporate world at Shell where he worked for ten years within capital project management and business improvement.

“It was a great experience, and I learned a lot, but I constantly felt the urge to say, 'This could be improved if we made some changes.' That kind of flexibility just wasn't possible in large corporate environments,” he recalls.

Varkey says he always tried to build innovative projects on the side until he finally left the company in 2018 and started working for venture-backed startups, where he found a space to bring his ideas to life.

For the past five years, Varkey has worked for startups like Gympass and Entera as a head of strategy and analytics. Now, as the founder of Offer Approved, he continues to work on new projects while driving his ticketing platform forward in Houston.

Varkey’s vision goes beyond just sports tickets and local markets — he aims to expand into areas like restaurant reservations, hotel stays, and other time-sensitive services, even offering deals to clients when traveling or exploring new cities.

“I believe in the power of negotiation, and I envision a future where people can make offers on anything with an expiration date,” he says.

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UH receives $2.6M gift to support opioid addiction research and treatment

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The estate of Dr. William A. Gibson has granted the University of Houston a $2.6 million gift to support and expand its opioid addiction research, including the development of a fentanyl vaccine that could block the drug's ability to enter the brain.

The gift builds upon a previous donation from the Gibson estate that honored the scientist’s late son Michael, who died from drug addiction in 2019. The original donation established the Michael C. Gibson Addiction Research Program in UH's department of psychology. The latest donation will establish the Michael Conner Gibson Endowed Professorship in Psychology and the Michael Conner Gibson Research Endowment in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences.

“This incredibly generous gift will accelerate UH’s addiction research program and advance new approaches to treatment,” Daniel O’Connor, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, said in a news release.

The Michael C. Gibson Addiction Research Program is led by UH professor of psychology Therese Kosten and Colin Haile, a founding member of the UH Drug Discovery Institute. Currently, the program produces high-profile drug research, including the fentanyl vaccine.

According to UH, the vaccine can eliminate the drug’s “high” and could have major implications for the nation’s opioid epidemic, as research reveals Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) is treatable.

The endowed professorship is combined with a one-to-one match from the Aspire Fund Challenge, a $50 million grant program established in 2019 by an anonymous donor. UH says the program has helped the university increase its number of endowed chairs and professorships, including this new position in the department of psychology.

“Our future discoveries will forever honor the memory of Michael Conner Gibson and the Gibson family,” O’Connor added in the release. “And I expect that the work supported by these endowments will eventually save many thousands of lives.”

CenterPoint and partners launch AI initiative to stabilize the power grid

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Houston-based utility company CenterPoint Energy is one of the founding partners of a new AI infrastructure initiative called Chain Reaction.

Software companies NVIDIA and Palantir have joined CenterPoint in forming Chain Reaction, which is aimed at speeding up AI buildouts for energy producers and distributors, data centers and infrastructure builders. Among the initiative’s goals are to stabilize and expand the power grid to meet growing demand from data centers, and to design and develop large data centers that can support AI activity.

“The energy infrastructure buildout is the industrial challenge of our generation,” Tristan Gruska, Palantir’s head of energy and infrastructure, says in a news release. “But the software that the sector relies on was not built for this moment. We have spent years quietly deploying systems that keep power plants running and grids reliable. Chain Reaction is the result of building from the ground up for the demands of AI.”

CenterPoint serves about 7 million customers in Texas, Indiana, Minnesota and Ohio. After Hurricane Beryl struck Houston in July 2024, CenterPoint committed to building a resilient power grid for the region and chose Palantir as its “software backbone.”

“Never before have technology and energy been so intertwined in determining the future course of American innovation, commercial growth, and economic security,” Jason Wells, chairman, president and CEO of CenterPoint, added in the release.

In November, the utility company got the go-ahead from the Public Utility Commission of Texas for a $2.9 billion upgrade of its Houston-area power grid. CenterPoint serves 2.9 million customers in a 12-county territory anchored by Houston.

A month earlier, CenterPoint launched a $65 billion, 10-year capital improvement plan to support rising demand for power across all of its service territories.

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This article originally appeared on our sister site, EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Houston researchers develop material to boost AI speed and cut energy use

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A team of researchers at the University of Houston has developed an innovative thin-film material that they believe will make AI devices faster and more energy efficient.

AI data centers consume massive amounts of electricity and use large cooling systems to operate, adding a strain on overall energy consumption.

“AI has made our energy needs explode,” Alamgir Karim, Dow Chair and Welch Foundation Professor at the William A. Brookshire Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at UH, explained in a news release. “Many AI data centers employ vast cooling systems that consume large amounts of electricity to keep the thousands of servers with integrated circuit chips running optimally at low temperatures to maintain high data processing speed, have shorter response time and extend chip lifetime.”

In a report recently published in ACS Nano, Karim and a team of researchers introduced a specialized two-dimensional thin film dielectric, or electric insulator. The film, which does not store electricity, could be used to replace traditional, heat-generating components in integrated circuit chips, which are essential hardware powering AI.

The thinner film material aims to reduce the significant energy cost and heat produced by the high-performance computing necessary for AI.

Karim and his former doctoral student, Maninderjeet Singh, used Nobel prize-winning organic framework materials to develop the film. Singh, now a postdoctoral researcher at Columbia University, developed the materials during his doctoral training at UH, along with Devin Shaffer, a UH professor of civil engineering, and doctoral student Erin Schroeder.

Their study shows that dielectrics with high permittivity (high-k) store more electrical energy and dissipate more energy as heat than those with low-k materials. Karim focused on low-k materials made from light elements, like carbon, that would allow chips to run cooler and faster.

The team then created new materials with carbon and other light elements, forming covalently bonded sheetlike films with highly porous crystalline structures using a process known as synthetic interfacial polymerization. Then they studied their electronic properties and applications in devices.

According to the report, the film was suitable for high-voltage, high-power devices while maintaining thermal stability at elevated operating temperatures.

“These next-generation materials are expected to boost the performance of AI and conventional electronics devices significantly,” Singh added in the release.

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