3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Kelly Pracht of nVenue, Aimee Gardner of SurgWise, and Kelly Avant of Mercury. Courtesy photos

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from sports tech to venture capital — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Kelly Pracht, CEO and co-founder of nVenue

nVenue's proprietary predictive analytics appear at the bottom right corner of the screen on Apple TV broadcasts. Photo via nvenue.com

Next time you're watching an Astros game on Apple TV, check the bottom right-hand side of the screen. That prediction data comes by way of a Texas startup with deep Houston roots. nVenue, co-founded by Houstonian Kelly Pracht, struck a deal earlier this year that allowed her data-driven sports analytics platform on the screens of baseball viewers this season.

"In under two weeks we structured the deal, convinced them it worked, pulled together every bit of testing we could — by then we only had one week of pre-season games to test — and we pulled it off," Pracht says.

The technology has a lot of potential when it comes to microbetting — a part of sports fandom that's growing by the second. Click here to read more.

Aimee Gardner, CEO and president of SurgWise

SurgeWise is giving surgical teams the right support for hiring. Photo via SurgWise.com

Hiring surgeons is a whole thing — tons of paperwork, inequitable and archaic processes, and lots of medical practitioners' time wasted. Five years ago, Aimee Gardner came up with a solution and founded SurgWise Consulting, where she serves as president and CEO.

"We help provide assessments to help screen competencies and attributes that people care about," Gardner says. "(Those) are really hard to assess, but really differentiate people who really thrive in training in their careers and people who don't."

Now, Gardner is tapping into the last five years of data she's accumulated and has big plans for developing a tech platform for her solution. Click here to read more.

Kelly Avant, investment associate at Mercury Fund

Kelly Avant, investment associate at Houston-based Mercury Fund, shares how and why she made her way into the venture capital arena. Photo courtesy of Mercury

Kelly Avant's resume might not make sense to you at first. She went from a gender studies major in undergrad, followed by a stint in the Peace Corps, before heading to law school. After moving on to get her MBA over her JD, Avant realized a way she could really make the biggest impact: venture capital.

"VC is an awesome way to shape the future in a more positive way because you literally get to wire money to the most innovative thinkers, who are building solutions to the world’s problems," Avant tells InnovationMap.

Avant joined the Mercury Fund team last year as an MBA associate before joining full time as investment associate. Now, after completing her MBA from Rice University this month, Avant tells InnovationMap why she's excited about this new career in investment in a Q&A. Click here to read more.

Kelly Avant, investment associate at Houston-based Mercury Fund, shares how and why she made her way into the venture capital arena. Photo courtesy of Mercury

Houston innovator joins VC world to increase her social impact

Q&A

Kelly Avant didn't exactly pave a linear career path for herself. After majoring in gender studies, volunteering in the Peace Corps, and even attending law school — she identified a way to make a bigger impact: venture capital.

InnovationMap: From law school and the peace corps, what drew you to start a career in the VC world?

Kelly Avant: I graduated from Rice University with an MBA, starting scouting for an investment firm in my first year, and by the summer after my first year I was essentially working full-time interning with Mercury. But, I like to tell people about my undergraduate degree in gender studies and rhetoric from a little ski college in Colorado. If you meet someone else in venture capital with a degree in gender studies, please connect us, but I think I might be the only one. I’ll spare you what I used to think — and say — about business students, but I have really come full circle.

I always thought I would work in a nonprofit space, but after serving in Cambodia with the Peace Corps, working for the National Domestic Violence Hotline, and briefly attending Emory Law School with the intention of becoming a civil rights lawyer.I found that time and time again the root of the problem was a lack of resources. The world’s problems were not going to be solved with my idealism alone.

The problem with operating as a nonprofit in a capitalism is you basically always pandering to the interests of the donors. The NFL was a key sponsor of The National Domestic Violence Hotline. The United States has a complicated, to put it lightly, relationship with Cambodia and Vietnam. It became pretty clear that the donor/nonprofit relationship was oftentimes putting the wrong party in the driver’s seat. I was, and still am, very interested in alternative financing for nonprofits. I became convinced that the most exciting businesses were building solutions to the world’s problems while also turning a profit, which allows them to survive to have a sustainable positive impact.

VC is an awesome way to shape the future in a more positive way because you literally get to wire money to the most innovative thinkers, who are building solutions to the world’s problems.

IM: What are some companies you’re excited about?

KA: There are a couple super interesting founders I’ve met directly engaging with . To name a few: CiviTech, DonateStock, and Polco.

I’m very proud to work on mercury investments like Houston’s own, Topl, which has built an extremely lightweight and energy efficient Blockchain that enables tracking of ethical supply chains from the initial interaction.
I’m also excited about mercury’s investment in Zirtue, which enables relationship based peer to peer lending to solve the massive problem of predatory payday loans.

We have so many awesome founders in our portfolio. The best part about working in VC is meeting passionate innovators every day. I get excited to go to work everyday and help them to build better solutions.

IM: Why are you so passionate about bringing diversity and inclusion into Mercury?

KA: I love working with exciting, highly capable, super smart people. That category includes so many people who have been historically excluded. As an investment team member at Mercury, I do have a voice, and I have an obligation to use that voice to speak highly of the best people in rooms of influence.

IM: With your new role, what are you most focused on?

KA: In my new role, I am identifying and researching high potential investments. We’re building out a Mercury educational series to lift the veil of VC. We want to facilitate a series that gives all founders the basic skills to pass VC due diligence and have the opportunity to build the next innovative companies. My goal is ultimately to produce the best returns possible for our investors, and we can’t accomplish that goal unless we’re building out resources to meet the best founders and help them grow.

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This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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Intuitive Machines lands $148M as part of NASA Moon Base funding

to the moon

Houston-based Intuitive Machines has been awarded $148.3 million to deliver its Nova-C lander to the moon by 2028. The funding is part of $600 million that NASA recently awarded to three companies as part of the agency’s Moon Base Program.

The contracts aim to support sustained human presence and commercial operations on the Moon. Austin-based Firefly Aerospace was awarded $144.2 million by NASA for one mission and Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic netted $297.9 million for two lunar landings. Intuitive Machine's award is the company's sixth task order under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program.

“We’re building a proving ground for Moon Base operations,” Ryan Stephan, NASA’s Moon Base acting director of cargo landers, said in a news release. “Accelerating our Moon mission ordering cadence and launch opportunities enable us to move quickly to learn, iterate, and improve.”

Under the latest task order, Intuitie Machines will deliver three scientific and operational payloads to the moon, which include a:

Linear Energy Transfer Spectrometer (LETS) radiation monitor to gather critical environmental safety data
Advanced stereo cameras to analyze surface-plume interactions (SCALPSS)
Laser retroreflector array (LRA) for precise cislunar positioning

The funding breakdown includes a $68.6 million base contract and a $79.7 million performance incentive for Intuitive Machines.

The company says the funding will allow it to create a standardized and repeatable "lunar utility pipeline" for delivering cargo to the moon.

"We are shifting the paradigm from custom aerospace engineering to commercial mass production of lunar infrastructure," Steve Altemus, CEO of Intuitive Machines, said in a separate news release. "Our flight-proven Nova-C platform allows us to build, test, and deploy multiple landers in parallel using Industry 4.0-powered manufacturing. This contract directly advances our core mission to provide persistent, reliable, and commercial baseline of transport, connectivity, and operations that allows our customers to stay longer and achieve more on the Moon."

NASA also shared that it is exploring plans to send PROMISE, a rover based on the Mars Perseverance and Curiosity rovers, to the moon and it plans to seek proposals for additional lunar lander missions, technology demonstrations, a communications and navigation satellite network, and new science payloads to support its lunar outpost. NASA is developing its Moon Base near the lunar South Pole. The agency expects it to come to fruition sometime after 2032.

Intuitive Machines had received its last CLPS award for $180.4 million in March 2026. It will be the first mission to utilize the company's larger cargo lunar lander, Nova-D. The company was also recently awarded a $1 million grant from Maryland Gov. Wes Moore to expand its robotics operations in the state.

UT team develops wearable technology for atmospheric water harvesting

In The Air

Engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a prototype jacket that harvests clean drinking water directly from the atmosphere, and it works even in the driest desert conditions.

The research, published in Science Advances, marks the latest milestone in nearly a decade of work by materials scientist and chair professor Guihua Yu and his team at the Cockrell School of Engineering's Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering and Texas Materials Institute. The wearable technology marks a significant leap: instead of a bulky, stationary machine, this jacket does the work.

Photo courtesy of UT Austin

"We have been working on atmospheric water harvesting technology for a number of years," Yu says. "This current version is even more wearable. We're transitioning from conventional, more stationary water harvesting to something truly portable and personal."

Yu's lab first published work on hydrogel-based water harvesting around 2019, and the jacket is the latest evolution of that platform, now called AirGel. Last year, the broader AirGel invention won the top prize in the graduate category of the National Collegiate Inventors Competition.

The jacket is woven with specially engineered hydrogel fibers; ultra-porous materials that attract and absorb moisture from the surrounding air much like a household desiccant. Unlike a desiccant, the material doesn't require intense heat to release that water. The hydrogel is thermally responsive, meaning a modest rise in temperature — even from mild solar heating — is enough to release the water it has captured.

So, somebody would be wearing the jacket, or perhaps carrying this gel-like textile as a blanket, as it passively absorbs moisture from the air. Then they would detach the textile panels and place them into a small, portable collector unit; essentially a compact heater. The water evaporates out of the textile, condenses inside the collector, and drips out as clean, drinkable water.

"It immediately becomes drinkable because it already goes through the distillation process," Yu explains.

In trials, the jacket produced between 400 and 900 milliliters of water per day depending on humidity, or roughly 14-30 ounces, nearly a quart, depending on the air's humidity. With one kilogram of the textile, the researchers found they could generate approximately 3.7-4 liters of water in arid conditions, and potentially double that in humid ones. So far, the team has tried the jacket out in very dry, semi-dry, and humid areas, and the jacket was able to pull water from each climate.

Lead researcher Chuxin Lei, a postdoctoral researcher on Yu's team and co-author on the paper, says the goal was to rethink who this technology could serve.

"Many current [atmospheric water harvesting] systems are still built as rigid or stationary platforms, making them less suitable for people who are moving, working outdoors, or operating in some remote environment. This lead us to ask whether we could build a water harvesting system that could become more like clothing — light, wearable, flexible, and naturally suited for personal use," Lei says.

The potential applications are wide-ranging. Yu's team has previously worked with the Department of Defense on water solutions for soldiers, where water logistics can be dangerous and costly. The technology could also serve hikers, emergency responders, disaster relief workers, and agricultural and field workers. Anyone who needs clean water on the go and far from infrastructure.

The team also sees a potential future where the technology complements large-scale centralized water systems rather than replacing them.

"Our solution cannot be a universal solution for all," Yu acknowledges. "But I think it's an extremely important alternative."

For now, the jacket is still a laboratory prototype, but Yu and Lei are optimistic. With the right industry partnerships, they say, the technology could realistically reach commercial scale within three to five years.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com, written by Natalie Grigson.

Houston ranks among world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems

Startup Status

Long known as the Energy Capital of the World, Houston also ranks among the world’s top 30 emerging startup ecosystems, according to a new report.

The report from Startup Genome, a research and advisory organization, doesn’t assign a specific numeric ranking to Houston’s startup ecosystem. Rather, it puts Houston in the ranking range of 21 to 30 for emerging ecosystems. Startup Genome weighed factors such as early-stage funding, performance and talent to identify the top emerging ecosystems.

Houston also gained notice for being one of the world’s 20 emerging ecosystems with at least four unicorn startups in the past 10 years. Houston and nine other ecosystems each had four unicorns.

According to StartupBlink, a startup research platform, Houston’s startup ecosystem grew 24 percent in 2025, with over 1,300 startups and total startup funding exceeding $808 million. StartupBlink places Houston at No. 46 among the world’s top 100 startup ecosystems.

In a recent post on LinkedIn, David Horsup, executive in residence at the Rice Alliance Clean Energy Accelerator, wrote that Houston “has all the ingredients to be wildly successful if it stays true to its differentiated pillars that drive the economy — energy, medical, and aerospace.”

Mumbai topped Startup Genome’s list of emerging ecosystems, followed by Istanbul, Madrid, Salt Lake City-Provo and Barcelona. After Salt Lake City-Provo, the top U.S. ecosystems were Phoenix, Detroit, Minneapolis and Las Vegas.

Silicon Valley led Startup Genome’s ranking of the world’s top established ecosystems, followed by New York City, London, Tel Aviv and Boston. Austin landed at No. 18 in this category and Dallas at No. 27.

“For much of the past decade, this report has chronicled the welcome dispersion of opportunity beyond the traditional hubs,” Startup Genome writes. “That trend has not died — but it has been complicated. Capital and scale are consolidating once more, particularly in the United States, and the gap between leading and emerging ecosystems is widening.”

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