This week's Houston innovators to know roundup includes Harvin Moore, James Lancaster, and Joshua Baer. Courtesy photos

Today starts the Houston Tech Rodeo — a week full of innovation-focused events — and its sure to corral entrepreneurs and investors across the city spur discussions of innovation and technology.

This week's Houston innovators to know includes the man at the helm of the organization behind the Tech Rodeo, plus two investors that are making moves in Houston as well as statewide.

Harvin Moore, president of Houston Exponential

Courtesy of HX

Houston Exponential has helped to coordinate over 30 innovation-focused events for the inaugural Houston Tech Rodeo, which will take place March 2 to 6 — in coordination with the start of the Houston Livestock Show And Rodeo — and will feature panels about diversity, reverse pitch events with startups and accelerators, on-stage office hours, and more.

"Really one of the things that makes a tech ecosystem like Houston really work and purr is when people get together, and people are able to bump into each other and bounce ideas off each other. Businesses do well, ideas thrive, and things happen," Harvin Moore, president of HX, says on the Houston Innovators Podcast. "We basically saw this as an opportunity to let the startup development organizations in town schedule their events around a particular week that really look good on a calendar."

Click here to read more and stream the episode.

James Y. Lancaster, Texas branch manager for Arkansas-based VIC Technology Venture Development

Courtesy of VIC

James Lancaster, Texas branch manager for Arkansas-based VIC Technology Venture Development, knows most startups fail for one of three reasons — no market need, running out of money, and not having a strong team. In his most recent guest article for InnovationMap, Lancaster dives into this third reason with key things founders must think about to give their startup the best shot at success.

"Like market need, evaluating the management team is on virtually every venture capitalist's list of what they look for in their target investments and you need to get it right," Lancaster says.

Click here to read more.

Joshua Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory

Courtesy of Capital Factory

While not technically a Houstonian, this Austinite gets an honorary title for his work here. Austin-based accelerator and investment organization Capital Factory recently merged with Station Houston, and CEO and Founder Joshua Baer says it's just the beginning of his focus on Houston startups.

"In total right now, we have 40 companies ever that have joined our accelerator from Houston, which is still a pretty significant number," he tells InnovationMap. "This year, we expect more than 40 companies to join the accelerator from Houston."

Click here to read more.Click here to read more.

Capital Factory has doubled down on Houston, and Founder and CEO Josh Baer shares how it's all part of his Texas Manifesto. Photo courtesy of Capital Factory

Capital Factory founder plans to double portfolio companies in Houston this year

Q&A

A statewide accelerator program has doubled down on Houston, and it's just the beginning.

Austin-based Capital Factory, which also has a presence in Dallas, recently merged with Station Houston in an effort to expand their mentor network and grow its startup portfolio with the addition of Houston companies.

As of today, Capital Factory has 40 startups from Houston in its portfolio, says Josh Baer, founder and CEO of Capital Factory, and Baer says he expects to add an additional 40 in 2020. The Station merger will help spur that growth and also play into Capital Factory's greater Texas Manifesto mission to advance innovation statewide.

"This is not just about adding one more city," Baer says. "It's really about how there's a lot of unique things that Houston brings that are going to make the whole picture a lot stronger."

Baer sat down with InnovationMap to discuss the details of the merger, how Capital Factory will be tuned into The Ion, and how Houston startups can tap into Capital Factory — both locally and at this year's SXSW.

InnovationMap: Capital Factory has been active in Houston for a few years and announced a partnership with The Cannon last year. How has that activation been going?

Josh Baer: We've been in Houston for quite a while now. We started off with our Texas Manifesto almost three years ago and the first thing we did was a listening tour of all the different cities, and we spent a bunch of time in Houston.

Part of the growth we've seen in part is from our partnership with The Cannon as they've opened. They've been a great partner allowing us to reach all of Houston because Houston is really big. It's not like Austin where you can primarily service from one place. We're not builders, that's not our role. We want to be wherever everybody else is doing great things. And that's The Cannon, The Ion, and the Texas Medical Center and all the other places too. There's lots of room for different flavors and focuses and groups, and we need to be at all those places.

IM: What's Capital Factory's presence in Houston and how do you see it growing?

JB: Last year, we hired our first two employees in Houston — that was Kendrick and Brittany, our mentor coordinator and venture associate — so that we could build our mentor network and connect them into the rest of Texas and source the best companies and connect them to the rest of Texas. Last year with those two employees, we brought in 14 Houston companies into our accelerator.

In total right now, we have 40 companies ever that have joined our accelerator from Houston, which is still a pretty significant number. This year, we expect more than 40 companies to join the accelerator from Houston.

IM: How will Capital Factory be involved in The Ion?

JB: Well we are so happy that we have exactly the role we would want to have at The Ion. And that is having some prime space right in the middle of it, and we're located not in the coworking space but in the event space because that's really, we want to be — we want to be where everyone is meeting and activating.

One of the things that we'll focus on is building out the mentor network at The Ion and connecting it into the rest of our mentor network. We're not going to be the only accelerator there. There's going to be a bunch of accelerators there. There's gonna be a bunch of mentor networks. And we're excited to partner with all of those and many more probably bring great people into our networks. I'm pretty confident we'll be the biggest mentor network there and we'll be the default one. We'll be the main one that everybody's part of, and particularly because it connects into everything else. But we'll do that in a really collaborative way.

IM: You kind of dove headfirst into the Dallas innovation ecosystem with a real estate play. Why did making these partnerships make more sense for Houston?

JB: Well, Capital Factory isn't backed by a big university or a billionaire, or a pension fund or something. It's really backed by entrepreneurs. And so while we're fortunate that we do have capital to invest in these startups, our value is not really like the capital like that builds buildings. It takes a lot of money and a lot of capital and that comes from universities and different types of investors and from communities right from the city and others that are part of that.

And so in Dallas, when we looked at that market, there was a real need — nobody was building a place like this, so we had to. We needed a center of gravity. Dallas is big too — other people will build more and we're going to need to be at those places too, just like in Houston.

But in Houston, not only did we are Texas Medical Center, and then we already had The Cannon and there's going to be The Ion, which are hundreds of thousands of square feet of prime real estate that's going to be amazing. We don't want to recreate that or compete with that. We want to be part of that.

So, if somebody else is already putting up tens or a hundreds of millions of dollars to build the building, I don't need to do that. I want to be part of that. My value is not capital. It's bringing the people into the building. It's activating the building and bringing programming into it, and that's where Capital Factory really adds the most value.

IM: How exactly did the merger with Station Houston come about?

JB: You know, it goes all the way back to the very beginning. I'm pretty sure that I was one of the first people that the founders of Station talked to when they were getting started when Emily and Blair and others were working on it. You know, Capital Factory was the place they came to look at. And, I was friends with all of them, and we were very open book about it, and said, "Hey, you know, here's how we work. We should see how we can work together." Because of that, we've always had a good relationship — Station was the first place that we ever went on a bus trip to Houston. We've had lots of overlap between our mentor networks and startups that we work with and others.

And Station has gone through some different changes over the years — leadership and their model evolved from for profit to nonprofit and onward. And through those changes, we just kept moving closer and closer together. It became really clear, especially with the launch of The Ion, that it was really the perfect opportunity for us to align ourselves even more closely and really connected fully into the rest of what's happening in the rest of the state.

IM: I’ve spoken to Gabriella Rowe, former CEO of Station, about it and she really sees it as a return to Station’s roots as an organization. How do you see the merger for Capital Factory?

JB: Well for us, you know, I really like the analogy of a stool. Everybody knows that to have a good foundation, a stool needs to have three legs. And, our mission in connecting Texas together through our Texas Manifesto. [Austin and Dallas were] working and working well, but it still wasn't a strong foundation. Ramping this up across Dallas and Houston, it completes the foundation and gives it a really strong footing and a really powerful footing to make it a Texas wide play.

We don't see this as a cookie cutter kind of thing. Each city is different. Each city has different needs and brings different things [to the table]. And we see that for sure from Houston. The type of entrepreneurs and companies that we've worked with are different. They're working on big, messy problems — robots and dangerous things. And that is exciting and attracts other partners — the big companies and the army and others that want tap into that too. And so, this is not just about adding one more city. It's really about how there's a lot of unique things that Houston brings that that's going to make the whole picture a lot stronger.

IM: What’s the status of the merger at this point?

JB: The paperwork's done, and we're taking a very intentionally slow process with [the execution of the merger]. We told everybody, "you shouldn't expect to see a lot to change fast." We want to be careful and thoughtful. So, we're going to listen a lot, and we're going to make changes slowly. And our goal is that for all the Station members, this is just a value add. They get everything they had before, plus now they get more. Now they get access to the Capital Factory network now, and they get access over time to more at the ion.

[But bigger picture,] it's not done at all. We barely started. We're still really listening and learning, so I don't feel like much has happened yet. The beginning part is, right now, every station Houston member has access to the rest of the Capital Factory network — both physically and virtually. They can go to Austin or Dallas. They can go to The Cannon. And more importantly than that, they can use our online network of union.vc, which is a website where they can log in, create a profile, and they can see all the other startups and mentors across the state and they can be seen by them. And that's what we can do to help connect them all together.

IM: Capital Factory kept Station’s remaining staff, right? Will Capital Factory be hiring more staff in Houston? 

JB: Right, we now have five Houston employees, three of them used to be Station's. We do expect to hire, but we don't have any specific roles to announce, but we have over a dozen people on the team in Dallas now two years into it.

IM: How can Houston startups make the most of SXSW this year?

JB: Honestly, our goal is to be the easy button. The first thing is come to Capital Factory. Capital Factory is an official South by Southwest house. This year, it's all official programming. And of course, the type of programming that you're going to see is focused on startups and government and defense.

We'll have Fast Company, Deloitte, Booz Allen, the army, and the air force — all kinds of other people there. And so that's an easy place to plug in. And for entrepreneurs who are part of our network, they don't have to have South badge to do that. They can be part of what's going on at Capital Factory as members.

IM: For startups wanting to get involved with Capital Factory, what's step one?

JB: The first step is to come to The Cannon or Station and meet us possible. And the person that first person they want to meet is Brittany Barreto, who's our venture associate. That's her job is to scout startups and meet them and help kind of bring them into the funnel.

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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.