3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Jason Bock of CTMC, Barbara Burger, and Mario Amaro of Ease. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from cell therapy to energy transition — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Jason Bock, founder and CEO of CTMC

Jason Bock, founder and CEO of the Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to explain the complicated — yet necessary — process of scaling cell therapies. Photo courtesy

Last year, a project out of MD Anderson spun out to create a new joint venture, CTMC — Cell Therapy Manufacturing Center, with National Resilience, a company that was founded to help advance life-saving therapeutics. The JV is based in the Texas Medical Center and led by CEO Jason Bock, who says the entity's location is critical.

"Houston has a chance to play a role in all aspects of cell therapy," he says, from discovery to the clinical side. "Some really interesting cell therapies that are in development were discovered here in Houston."

Bock shares more on how the impact CTMC is making on cell therapy advancement on the podcast. Read more.

Barbara J. Burger, startup adviser and mentor 

Energy innovation expert, Barbara Burger, shares how she sees the future of energy playing out as a dance between mice — the startups — and elephants — the incumbent corporations. Photo courtesy

The way Barbara Burger sees it, the energy transition depends on a dance between startups, or the mice, and corporates, aka the elephants. In a guest column for InnovationMap, she explains what questions each side needs to address.

"There are lots of questions here and the why is often an iterative journey for both sides," she explains. "It is as much mindset, influence, strategy, champions, and risk tolerance at individual levels as it about technology and economics." Read more.

Mario Amaro, CEO and founder of Ease

Mario Amaro, founder of Ease, was selected for one of Amazon's accelerator programs. Photo courtesy of Amazon

Amazon's AWS Impact Accelerator Latino Founders Cohort named the 20 startups joining its accelerator that will connect Latinx founders to its network of mentors, provide programming, and even dole out funding.

Houston-based Ease, founded by Mario Amaro in 2018, the health care fintech platform allows for medical professionals to start, grow, and manage their private practices with bookkeeping tools and other software infrastructure. So far, the company has worked with more than 300 practices. Read more.

A Houston company has joined a new Amazon program focused on Latin American founders. Photo courtesy of Amazon

Houston startup named to Amazon's Latinx-focused cohort

ready to grow

Amazon named the 20 startups joining its accelerator that will connect Latinx founders to its network of mentors, provide programming, and even dole out funding.

The AWS Impact Accelerator Latino Founders Cohort is a part of Amazon's $30 million commitment to supporting underrepresented startup founders. The eight-week program started this week in Amazon's Seattle headquarters.

“This cohort of the AWS Impact Accelerator aims to highlight the viability and ingenuity of Latino-led startups, so the VC community can increase support to these founders,” says Howard Wright, vice president and global head of startups at AWS, in the news release. “We’re looking forward to playing an active role in helping these companies turbocharge their growth through access to capital, experts, and all of the innovations that the AWS tech stack has to offer.”

Houston-based Ease, founded by Mario Amaro in 2018, the health care fintech platform allows for medical professionals to start, grow, and manage their private practices with bookkeeping tools and other software infrastructure. So far, the company has worked with more than 300 practices. Per Cruncbase data, the company has raised $2.8 million in pre-seed and grant funding. According to Amazon, the company's investors include Slauson & Co. and Precursor Ventures.

Mario Amaro, founder of Ease, was selected for one of Amazon's accelerator programs. Photo courtesy of Amazon

Last year, Ease was named among the 50 companies in the inaugural cohort of the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund. In that program, each company received an equity-free $100,000 investment, as well as programming and support from Google, mentorship from technical and business experts, access to free mental health therapy, and more.

Ease stood out among the nearly 1,100 submissions to the program, according to the release, and joins 19 other companies from across the country and even Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Each of the cohort companies will receive up to $225,000 in cash and AWS Activate credits, alongside a training curriculum, networking opportunities with Amazon staff and potential investors, and ongoing advisory support.

The other startups in the program include:

  • Alvva, a, immigrant-focused fintech platform from California
  • Cogniflow, a personal AI platform founded in Colombia with a New York US HQ
  • Deskfy, a marketing portal from Brazil with its US HQ in Delaware
  • DivySci Software, an edtech organization founded in New York
  • EducUp, an edtech company from Florida
  • Fielder, a Mexico-founded enterprise software-as-a-service with US-based operations in Delaware
  • GamerSafer, a security tech company within gaming from California
  • Kigüi, a Mexican money-saving grocery app
  • Kuentro, a Venezuelan affordable hiring platform that caters to middle- and working-class job seekers
  • Lazo Fintech Inc, a Florida-based fintech and legal platform
  • Leantime, a developer tool from North Carolina
  • Monadd, a Florida-founded personal finance platform
  • PilotoMail, a remote work platform founded in Puerto Rico
  • Sign-Speak, a New York startup with an American Sign Language device
  • STIGMA, a mental health mobile app from Illinois
  • Outtrip, a Argentina-founded tourism platform with US operations in Delaware
  • Panda Salud, a Mexico-based platform connecting health care small businesses with diagnostic test providers
  • Tienditapp, a Mexico-based app with a last-mile delivery model
  • TuCuota, a payment collections tool from Argentina
DocSpace was founded by Chief Product Officer Miles Montes (left) and CEO Mario Amaro, a physician and U.S. Navy Veteran. Photo courtesy of DocSpace

Houston digital health platform raises $1.2M seed round

money moves

A Houston-based software company providing clinicians a turn-key platform for their practice has announced the close of its seed funding round.

DocSpace raised $1.2 million in seed funding led by Slauson & Co. with participation by Precursor Ventures, Acrew Capital's Scout Fund, and SputnikATX Ventures. The company's angel investors Nathan and Sonia Baschez, Nikhil Krishnan, and Eliana Murillo. The company was founded by CEO Mario Amaro, a physician and U.S. Navy Veteran, and Chief Product Officer Miles Montes, an expert in platform product management previously at ADP and ShopLatinx.

"Existing practice management software requires clinicians to manually self-navigate the expensive and complicated business formation process before they're able to utilize any of their product services," says Amaro in a news release. "When you require clinicians to do all the hard work of starting a new business then force them to purchase expensive software, it's no surprise that fewer clinicians have the opportunity to build new businesses in their communities."

Since its launch in March 2020, DocSpace has helped hundreds of clinicians, therapists, dentists, physicians, and optometrists build their practices with its end-to-end software that provides, according to the release, HIPAA-compliant tools like "digital health storefronts with custom themes to back office management tools like scheduling, video conferencing, banking, payroll, and bookkeeping."

"Making it easier for clinicians to start new businesses is critical to decreasing clinician burnout, giving more choices to patients, and reducing the amount of administrative and overhead bloat in delivering health services. We should treat clinicians like entrepreneurs and reduce the barriers to them striking out on their own," says Nikhil Krishnan, the founder of Out-Of-Pocket and adviser and investor to DocSpace.

The seed funding go toward building out DocSpace Pay, a payment system tool for patients and clinicians.

"This is why we were inspired by Shopify's business model and the infrastructure they created to empower retail merchants to be small business owners," says Amaro. "We are building the first clinical practice operating system that provides clinician entrepreneurs the opportunity to seek practice independence, helping them get to market faster, while leveling the playing field so they can compete against large hospital systems and other VC-backed healthcare startups."


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SpaceX IPO set to be biggest ever and could make Elon Musk a trillionaire

IPO News

SpaceX says it plans to raise up to $75 billion when it goes public this month, setting the stage for the largest-ever stock market debut and putting Elon Musk on course to becoming the world's first trillionaire.

The company, formally known as Space Exploration Technologies Corp., said Wednesday it will sell 555.6 million shares at $135 a piece in an initial public offering. The estimated proceeds would easily top the $26 billion raised by oil giant Saudi Aramco in 2019. The offering would also give SpaceX a market value of $1.77 trillion. Only six companies in the S&P 500 are currently worth more, with Nvidia tops at $5.2 trillion.

Besides the size of the offering and the expected proceeds, SpaceX's amended prospectus updates details about how much control of the company Musk will have. As SpaceX's CEO, chief technical officer and chairman, Musk's voting power will come primarily through his ownership of 5.22 billion Class B shares, which give the holder 10 votes for every share held. According to the filing, Musk would have 82.4% of the voting power in the company.

Forbes currently values Musk's net worth at $826 billion and his stake in SpaceX at $542 billion. The estimated value of his SpaceX holdings was based on an overall value for the company of $1.25 trillion. Based on those numbers, a $1.77 trillion valuation for SpaceX would boost Musk's net worth by $223 billion, making him a trillionaire. However, much of Musk's worth is in stock that he has yet to cash in.

Even as it makes a bid for a blockbuster market debut, SpaceX is currently losing billions of dollars a year. The filing shows that the company lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue, and the losses kept piling up at the start of this year, too.

Fantastical plans

Time will tell how SpaceX fares on the market. Musk's plans for the company are as fantastical as the money he hopes raise in the sale.

Colorful, even frightening in parts, the IPO document strikes a contrast with the typically dry, technical prose in IPO documents, detailing plans to use proceeds from the sale to help put men on the moon again and perhaps even Mars. In one section, it talks of a need to build "a permanent human colony" on the red planet with "at least one million inhabitants" as existential threats loom that could consign man to "the same fate as the dinosaurs."

Musk has almost equally ambitious plans for his other publicly traded company, Tesla. His goal is to transform the maker of electric vehicles into a producer of robotaxis and humanoid robots. Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities wrote in a research note that he expects Tesla and SpaceX to merge next year.

AI plays a key role

Key to the success of both companies — and any merged entity — is artificial intelligence. In its IPO filing, SpaceX says it sees potential revenue from AI of up to $26.5 trillion. But that depends on another lofty Musk ambition — putting data centers in space, which is not technologically possible at the moment.

Transforming his space company into a primarily AI-focused company will be a challenge for Musk, who started xAI in 2023 with 11 other co-founders who have all since left. Some were recruited away by rivals.

Its main AI product, the chatbot Grok, is "less impressive than anything that we see from any other major player in the space, whether that's OpenAI, or Anthropic, or (Google's) Gemini," said IDC analyst Arnal Dayaratna.

Dayaratna said that doesn't mean SpaceX doesn't have potential as a major AI player, thanks in part to its computing partnership with Anthropic and Musk's recent deal that gave SpaceX the rights to buy AI coding tool Cursor for $60 billion later this year. Folding in Cursor's capabilities would give SpaceX access to the coveted business customers now using Anthropic's Claude or OpenAI's ChatGPT.

SpaceX plans to use the net proceeds from the IPO to fund the expansion of infrastructure for its AI and rocket businesses, and to beef up the constellation of satellites that power Starlink Mobile, among other investments.

The company plans to list on the Nasdaq under the symbol "SPCX" and could begin trading as soon as the end of next week.

And SpaceX isn't the only colossal market debut investors are now bracing for. Earlier this week, Anthropic submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission to officially start its own IPO clock.

OpenAI has not yet reported filing the initial SEC paperwork, but an IPO from the ChatGPT maker is widely expected.

"This listing represents the first major test for public markets after years of muted IPO activity with SpaceX paving the way for AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI to follow soon after," Ives wrote.

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Associated Press Technology Writer Matt O'Brien contributed.

New UH survey reveals concerns over AI data center growth in Houston

data findings

A new report out of the University of Houston shows that area residents remain wary of the long-term effects of operating data centers.

The recent survey from the University of Houston’s latest SPACE City Panel, conducted by the Center for Public Policy at the Hobby School of Public Affairs, shows that while 85 percent of Houston-area residents use AI, nearly 63 percent oppose the construction of AI data centers within 1 mile of their homes.

Respondents’ concerns centered around data centers’ high energy demand and the area’s power grid reliability. According to the survey, 32 percent of residents who oppose local data center projects would be more likely to support the centers if they relied on renewable energy over fossil fuels.

“Respondents understand that AI can bring economic and educational benefits, but they are also concerned about the physical infrastructure needed to fuel AI, especially data centers,” Soran Mohtadi, post-doctoral fellow at the Hobby School and a researcher on the report, said in a news release. “This physical infrastructure demands more electricity and water, leading to environmental impacts.”

Experts estimate that 6.5 gigawatts of data center capacity will be added to the Texas grid by 2030. And Houston’s data center capacity is predicted to more than double by 2028.

The Electric Reliability Council of Texas also projects electricity demand could reach 218 gigawatts by 2031, which would be more than double the record peak set in August 2023. Data centers are expected to account for 86 gigawatts of that new demand.

Survey respondents also said they are concerned about the state's future water supply, given the large amounts of water that data centers need to stay cool.

In terms of who’s responsible for that issue, 57.6 percent of respondents said they put the onus on Texas lawmakers, while 31.5 percent say tech companies should be responsible.

Additionally, more than 75 percent of respondents believed that data center developers and technology companies—not residents—should bear the cost of infrastructure upgrades to support data centers.

“Every decision legislators make has implications on residents’ everyday lives and local infrastructure now and in the future,” Maria P. Perez Arguelles, lead researcher on the report and research assistant professor at the Hobby School, added in the news release. “This issue is going to become more important in years to come, so this is just the beginning.”

Read the full report here.

Houston-born Cemvita makes breakthrough in sustainable fuel production

clean fuels

Houston-based biotech company Cemvita announced that it recently reached a critical milestone in the development of its FermOil product, which can be used to create Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and other renewable fuels at industrial scale.

The company shared in a news release that it completed a 75,000-liter industrial fermentation run at Belgium's Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant.

The campaign achieved target technical metrics for the production of FermOil, Cemvita’s renewable natural oil (RNO). FermOil is produced from industrial crude glycerin, an industrial byproduct, as opposed to traditional sugar-based feedstocks used in many bio-oil fermentation processes. It's designed to be a drop-in feedstock for creating SAFs.

Cemvita had previously advanced its FermOil production process through multiple scale-up stages before successfully reaching the 75,000-liter demonstration campaign, according to the company.

“This is not just a fermentation milestone,” Moji Karimi, CEO at Cemvita, said in the release. “It is a blueprint for how existing industrial infrastructure can evolve into circular bioeconomy infrastructure. Every biodiesel plant generating crude glycerin is a potential platform for renewable natural oil production.”

The milestone also supports the deployment of Cemvita’s industrial biomanufacturing platform, FermWorks, which integrates with existing energy and industrial infrastructure to turn waste carbon streams into SAFs and other materials. According to the release, Cemvita plans to move forward with commercial deployment discussions with partners in Brazil, Europe and in the UK. Cemvita already has a partnership with the Brazilian sustainable research institution REMA.

“We are proud to support innovative companies like Cemvita in scaling breakthrough industrial biotechnology solutions,” Hendrik Waegeman, head of business operations at Bio Base Europe Pilot Plant, added in the release. “Successfully operating at the 75,000-liter scale using a feedstock such as crude glycerin highlights both the maturity of the technology and the quality of the scale-up execution achieved by the Cemvita team.”

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

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