Houston oil and gas software exec eyes M&A activity following private equity deal

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Travis Parigi, CEO of LiquidFrameworks, is excited about the new doors that have been opened for his company. Courtesy of LiquidFrameworks

Travis Parigi has built his software within his own company for about 14 years. Now, he's in a position to further develop his product at a faster rate.

In January, LiquidFrameworks entered into a partnership with private equity firm, Luminate Capital. The new financial partner has opened doors for Parigi and LiquidFrameworks — including putting merger and acquisition activity on the table.

"I have historically written stuff from the ground up, and we're going to continue to do that, but we want to give our customers more than that," Parigi tells InnovationMap. "And I've never had the opportunity to go out and strategically target opportunities where it makes sense to compliment the product. And I think that's going to be a very exciting thing to do."

Parigi, founder and CEO, tells InnovationMap about how his company has transformed over the years — and especially over the past several months with its new financial backer.

InnovationMap: How did you get your start in software development?

Travis Parigi: I've been building software since I was a very young kid, actually. I started writing software for companies at a very early age and realized that I really, really enjoyed it. And so when I say young, I'm talking in grade school and high school. And I really found that it was rewarding and I enjoyed meeting the requirements that people gave me. From the very early days, I knew I wanted to start a software company, but I really wasn't sure exactly what it would do. I went to work in the consulting industry right after graduating from A&M University with a degree in computer science and engineering and was building software for variety of different companies that were their clients and started to get some exposure to the energy industry.

Then in the late 1990s, the company I was at was going through some financial struggles, and it became an opportune time for me to start my own consulting company building software for companies. One client I had was Schlumberger, and I really started seeing this similar business problem related to collecting data at the well site. The workers in the field were working with paper and Excel. I thought it was a great opportunity to move people out of manual and into the digital world.

IM: Now, over a decade later, what role do you feel LiquidFrameworks plays in the industry?

TP: We play a role of standardizing the datasets that our clients are working with as it relates to the quote to cash process. So, specifically around their pricing data and their catalog data. We're standardizing that data and we're getting it into form and a shape that allows them to easily keep it up to date and easily syndicated changes related to that data out to not only other offices and districts, but also field crew that may be occasionally connected to the network.

With that data, we can do all sorts of things that end up benefiting the customer — like using it to create field tickets, invoices, work orders, safety forms, quotes, and all sorts of transactions that really need to be based upon one homogenous set of data that standardize, that isn't floating around in various documents.

IM: Where does the artificial intelligence LiquidFrameworks has developed come into play?

TP: We're taking it one step further, and once they finished those transactions, they end up with not just the reference data as it relates to pricing, but also the transactional data, we can use that data to infer the best way to quote or price new services in the future that will position the company and the best possible place to win the deals that they're quoting and bidding against. We're using different types of artificial intelligence algorithms to do that.

Nowadays, companies like us have at our disposal tools in the AI world — specifically in the machine learning world — that we just didn't have when I started the company. Fourteen years ago when I started the business, cloud computing in 2005 was not nearly as ubiquitous as it is today. And it wasn't as widely accepted and it certainly wasn't as widely accepted as it is in the energy industry today.

IM: What kind of clients are you working with?

TP: We're targeting three different industries. The upstream oil and gas service provider market, the downstream service provider market, and the emergency response service provider market. On the upstream side, they are companies doing work at the well site, and in downstream, they are companies doing work at the refineries.

IM: As automation and cloud technology is being more adapted within oil and gas, what technologies are now on your radar?

TP: In the beginning, we spent a lot of time educating our potential customers about cloud computing and about technologies that we had available. And now that a lot of that is so well received, it just means that we don't necessarily have to focus on that anymore. We can focus really on what really brings ROI to the customers that implement our product.

I keep a keen watch on a lot of the different technologies that are emerging out there. Blockchain is certainly one of them that we're looking at. I think there's some interesting things that we might be able to do with that as it relates to price book management, which is complex and varied. It could be that blockchain could end up providing a nice mechanism for both parties to independently have pricing data verified.

We're always keeping an eye on and doing work in artificial intelligence, specifically around machine learning. I think there's always new interesting stuff taking place there outside. I would say those two technologies are something that we're pretty pretty keen on.

IM: How has the transition into private equity been with your new partner in Silicon Valley-based Luminate Capital?

TP: We had a financial partner prior to Luminate Capital called Houston Ventures. Our managing partner there was a guy named Chip Davis. He was fantastic, and he helped us grow the business for about seven years. Eventually, we got to a point where we had grown to a level where I felt like, in order to do some things we wanted to do, we needed to establish a new financial partner. Private equity made the most sense for us, and it's really allowing us to do some things that we couldn't do with venture.

Over the years, we built out a fairly extensive roadmap, and my development team has worked very hard and diligently to fulfill those items on the roadmap. But our customer base has really grown significantly, and we've moved up into enterprise customers who have asked for a lot of things that we want to put into our product. And so our long range roadmap has grown. For these new features, we either need to build that ourselves in house, but, in some cases, there are some things that are tangential and complimentary to our product that other companies have already. So, it could make sense for us to go out and acquire those kinds of companies. And with Luminate, they provided us not only capital for us to do that, but equally as important, they provided an engine that we can facilitate from an M&A perspective to help us go and source those deals, find them, help assess them, and ultimately help acquire them and then integrate them into the overall platform.

IM: How has the partnership benefitted your company from a networking and opportunities perspective?

TP: Their portfolio of companies are similar to us and that they're are all enterprise software companies. They're not necessarily in the energy space, but they're all enterprise software companies. Being able to network with those companies has really been helpful. We didn't have a CFO prior to Luminate coming in. Part of the deal was that they said, "hey, we really would encourage and recommend that you get a CFO at this stage because you're growing and you need it." They provided some relationships there to in the form of recruiters to help us source the CFO. And we ended up sourcing a local CFO — Paul Marvin — who's absolutely fantastic.

IM: How has Houston been as a home base for you?

TP: Houston has been fantastic for LiquidFrameworks. I started the business based here and see no reason to change that. It is a fantastic market for us, both from a customer perspective as well as an employee perspective. The employee talent base in Houston is rich and deep. There's a lot of technical people here, and obviously there's a ton of energy companies.

IM: With all your operations being in Houston, do you see opportunities for other offices in the future?

TP: We have customers all over the world — a lot in Canada, so I could see an office there for sales and implementation. I would say that as we grow, expanding sales to other geographies is certainly something that will ultimately end up doing. It's just not something we've had to do yet.

IM: Are you planning on growing operations here?

TP: We've added a couple dozen people to the team just over the past few months, and we plan on doubling the staff by the end of next year.

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Portions of this interview have been edited.

Houston-based LiquidFrameworks has been acquired by San Francisco-based Luminate Capital. Pexels

Houston startup exits to Bay Area private equity firm

Grand exit

A Houston startup has entered a deal with a San Francisco-based private equity firm, the companies announced on January 10. LiquidFrameworks, which provides cloud-based, mobile field operations management solutions to oil and gas, environmental, and industrial service companies, is now operating under Luminate Capital following the acquisition.

While not all the terms of the deal have been disclosed, Chip Davis, managing partner at Houston Ventures, says the transaction exceeded $50 million of PE investment from Luminate Capital. HV has been involved with LiquidFrameworks since 2012 and has invested a cumulative $6 million, Davis says, and brought in the company's current CEO and head of sales — both of who are still a part of the company's team.

"When we got involved, it was a very small company," says Davis. "As of today, it has enterprise customers of some of the largest oilfield services companies in the world."

According to the release, Hollie Haynes, Mark Pierce, and Sanjay Palakshappa from Luminate have joined the LiquidFrameworks board of directors. The PE fund's investment is a part of the recently closed $425 million Fund II.

"For over a decade, we have served field services companies by reducing revenue leakage, shortening cash collection cycles, and increasing overall operational efficiencies. We have streamlined the day-to-day operations for field services professionals and increased transparency across organizations by transforming previously paper- or excel-based workflows," says Travis Parigi, founder and COO of LiquidFrameworks, in the release.

"With a partner like Luminate Capital, we will continue to invest and develop product capabilities to better serve field services industries that have previously been overlooked by software innovation."

One of LiquidFrameworks' tools is FieldFX, which enhances companies' data accuracy and accelerates revenue capture and cash flow.

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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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