Houston early stage startup accelerator introduces latest cohort

growing gains

The latest cohort from gBETA Houston has been announced and is currently underway at the Downtown Launchpad. Photo courtesy of Downtown Launchpad

Five Houston startups are joining a global accelerator for a seven-week program to strategically grow their businesses.

Houston's gBETA, a part of gener8tor in partnership with the Downtown Launchpad, has launched its spring cohort — the seventh cohort since its launch in Houston in 2019 — this month. The free program lasts seven weeks and connects companies to gener8tor's network of mentors, customers, corporate partners, and investors.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Downtown Launchpad to bring these programs to life and bolster the technology and sustainability industries in Houston,” says Lauren Usher, gener8tor gBETA vice president, in a news release.

gBETA's equity-free model provides coaching for its cohort companies, which are all Houston-based, home-grown.

“It’s exciting to see the seventh cohort of gBETA Houston come together. We’ve seen so much growth from our previous alumni from our program, and we’re excited for that same impact to flourish with this incoming cohort,” says Muriel Foster, gBETA Houston director, in the release.

The ongoing cohort's members include:

  • Adaptagym revolutionizes the fitness and rehabilitation industries by offering a comprehensive and user-friendly platform that caters to the unique needs of all persons on the ability spectrum. The company matches users with the appropriate fitness and allied health professionals. Adaptagym is currently partnering with one clinic and four individuals for beta testing.
  • Circle.ooo is a B2B2C technology company streamlining event tech for small-to-medium event hosts, attendees and sponsors. The app-within-app concept allows event holders to create a free ‘Circle’, and Attendees create a single 'universal profile' digicard to instantly register for any Event without having multiple accounts, profiles or inputting data fields. Circle is a Houston-based Delaware C-Corp, is currently testing v 2.0 of the app, and has 27 customers on their waitlist.
  • Financial Aid Frenzy transforms the way students pay for college, one dollar at a time. Financial Aid Frenzy's crowdfunding platform is tailored to assist students in getting the money needed for their education by connecting them with donors who are passionate about helping them achieve their educational fundraising goals. Financial Aid Frenzy is a Houston-based Delaware C-Corp, with 40 customers interested in the platform.
  • Kash-In Academy utilizes digital “kash” to increase student engagement through monetized lessons and quizzes. With the Kash-In Academy platform, teachers are able to deposit “kash” for positive behavior and academic achievement. Kash-In Academy is approved in 12 school districts servicing 932 teachers and 8,069 students.
  • MendIt’s apparel care marketplace amplifies the choices for consumers to manage their closets more sustainably and empowers retailers with aftercare solutions that elevate their brand. Retailers work with MendIt to offer long-term product care to customers, helping to extend the life of their clothing, save money through reduced returns, and direct capital to local businesses. MendIt’s product is live and available nationwide via shipping, with three local drop-off locations in the Houston market, a waiting list of “menders” across 9 states, and hundreds of garments mended to date.
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This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Kaitlyn Allen of MendIt, Miguel Calatayud of iwi, and Tatiana Fofanova of Koda Health. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

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

Kaitlyn Allen, founder and chief strategy officer of MendIt

MendIt seeks to reduce textile waste by providing an easy-to-use app to make menders and customizers more accessible. Photo courtesy of MendIt

Kaitlyn Allen thought she had a great idea for a company — something that can help people repair clothing conveniently. And all of the pieces of the strategy already existed. There are plenty of seamstressing businesses around town, but not an easy way to navigate them. “

There’s a disconnect. There’s a market of people who potentially want to mend their clothes, but there’s no easy way of finding or accessing that service,” she says. “With this next generation, you need to meet them where they are.”

And where they are, Allen says, is on their phones.

MendIt is completing a pilot program with one mender — Connect Community in Gulfton area — in partnership with St. Luke's Gethsemane on Bellaire in Sharpstown. She also hopes to tap into a local artist who can help with customization — like embroidery, for instance. Click here to read more.

Miguel Calatayud, CEO of iwi

Miguel Calatayud, CEO of iwi, joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss his sustainable business of farming algae for nutritional products. Photo courtesy of iwi

Miguel Calatayud feels like he has the perfect storm of a product. Not only does his company iwi's nutritional supplement have a sustainability focus, it's also just a very competitive product in the marketplace. The company has created a sustainable suite of products from innovative algae farming in the deserts of Texas and New Mexico. These football field-sized farms operate on desert land using just salt water and sand and produce algae sustainably — all while absorbing CO2.

"We've been growing significantly for one main reason," Calatayud says. "It works."

Calatayud shares more about the impact he's making and why Houston is the ideal market for him to do it in on the Houston Innovators podcast. Click here to read more.

Tatiana Fofanova, co-founder and CEO of Koda Health

Tatiana Fofanova, co-founder and CEO of Koda, closed recent funding for the digital health startup. Image via LinkedIn

Tatiana Fofanova, Koda co-founder and CEO, has something to celebrate. The Houston-based startup announced this month that it raised $3.5 million in its latest seed round. The funding will be used to help the digital advanced care planning company double the size of its team in the next six months.

"Koda Health helps vulnerable people navigate and communicate difficult decisions about their health care journey. So, when hiring, we look for empathetic people who are phenomenal communicators," Tatiana Fofanova, Koda co-founder and CEO, says in a statement.

The Koda team will also use the funds to expand its operations to all 50 states. According to the statement, the team plans to focus on low-resource communities and operating in different languages. Click here to read more.

MendIt seeks to reduce textile waste by providing an easy-to-use app to make menders and customizers more accessible. Photo courtesy of MendIt

Houston startup tackles fast fashion with app that connects users to small business menders

sustainable startup

When Kaitlyn Allen’s grandmother died, she left a green sweater that Allen wanted to keep and wear in memory of her. But the sweater had a hole in it and, in a morbidly ironic fashion, the person Allen would have turned to to mend the sweater was her grandmother.

This sparked an idea for the Houstonian, who thought there might be other people out there with the same mending needs.

“We have two generations of people who don’t know how to sew,” Allen tells InnovationMap. “We did national studies to see where people fall within this, and only 4.2 percent of Americans actually take their clothes to get repaired.”

The rest of people, as one might assume, are just buying new clothes and throwing old items out, contributing to a massive — and growing — carbon footprint. Allen — who’s spent almost a decade running Global Affairs Associates, a sustainability consultancy — decided to look into just how big an impact the textile industry had.

Kaitlyn Allen, who's the founder and chief strategy officer for MendIt, has worked a decade in ESG consulting. Photo via mendit.app

“I learned about how the throw-away culture and fast fashion — the mass production of extraordinarily cheap textiles — leads to all these really humongous environmental problems,” Allen says, citing that the equivalent of a garbage truck full of textiles is landfilled or incinerated every second around the globe.

“It’s a really huge problem, but we don’t really see it in our culture,” Allen continues. “One of the simple things we can do to make an impact is to extend the life of the clothes we already own — mend them, take care of the, and don’t just throw them away after three months.”

In light of this research and the unmet need Allen saw from her own experience, she founded MendIt, a Houston startup that connects users digitally to the local seamstresses and menders. Her first idea of the company was to tap into the gig economy and “Uber-ize” the industry. But she quickly realized there was an opportunity to tap into the small businesses already working within this space. These businesses are usually not digitally savvy and usually women and immigrant-owned. While these businesses already exist, they aren’t tapping into the market need as best as they could, Allen says.

“There’s a disconnect. There’s a market of people who potentially want to mend their clothes, but there’s no easy way of finding or accessing that service,” she says. “With this next generation, you need to meet them where they are.”

And where they are, Allen says, is on their phones.

MendIt is completing a pilot program with one mender — Connect Community in Gulfton area — in partnership with St. Luke's Gethsemane on Bellaire in Sharpstown. She also hopes to tap into a local artist who can help with customization — like embroidery, for instance.

MendIt hopes to take the lessons learned from this pilot and expand within Houston before growing nationally. She’s also looking for partners — menders, retailers, and potential investors — down the road to further grow the business.

“The broader vision is to have every small business in the Unite States that does clothing repair or customization will be registered on the app so that local users can find them where they live and place orders through the app,” she says.

The MendIt app is available now as a part of the company's pilot program. Photo via mendit.app

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Houston founders launch edtech startup, pilot to pinpoint why students are struggling

learning gaps

Early detection. It sounds simple enough: identify a problem before it has the chance to become a bigger one.

But in practice, early detection is much more difficult to navigate, especially in education, when it comes to identifying the reasons behind a student's academic struggles.

That’s why co-founders Alapati “Al” Ware and Estela Montanez launched Progress Report, a Houston-built K-12 learning-intelligence platform designed to go beyond identifying that a student is struggling.

The platform recently began its pilot program with 35 educators and more than 200 students in Texas and Arizona.

“It’s a micro-learning school that works with children with disabilities, primarily dyslexia and nonverbal students,” Ware tells InnovationMap.

The platform is also being used by homeschool parents, home teachers and Houston educators, including those at SWPS College & Career Preparatory Academy, a Houston charter school.

Ware says Progress Report was designed to fill a gap he and Montanez saw in existing edtech. Some platforms cater almost entirely to students, leaving teachers with little insight into if and how a child is learning. Others focus heavily on district data, where “the student is just a number,” leaving teachers to navigate disconnected tools.

“Our goal was [to] focus purely on the teacher because the teacher is the backbone,” Ware says.

Progress Report traces student performance to learning gaps and prerequisite skills, helping educators understand not only where a student is struggling, but what may be causing it.

The platform then helps teachers build individualized instruction for general education students, students with special education and Individualized Education Program (IEP) needs, and Spanish-speaking learners—all within one educator-controlled system.

The goal is to reduce the guesswork and hours of manual work educators can spend developing individualized lesson plans.

Progress Report helps idenitify learning gaps and common roadblocks for each student. Image courtesy Progress Report

For Ware and Montanez, the mission is also personal.

The concept dates back to around 2023, when the co-founders first had to navigate and address their children’s educational needs.

Ware, Progress Report’s CEO and CTO with a background in edtech, built the platform end-to-end after watching his daughter, who had an IEP related to speech, struggle to get the support she needed.

Montanez, the company’s COO, brought another perspective. Her son is on the autism spectrum. She now leads Progress Report’s operations, partnerships and pilot execution while helping carry its focus on bilingual families from Puerto Rico to Houston.

Together, they began researching ways to personalize their children’s learning and help them progress academically. Montanez’s son went on to become an AP student and high school athlete, while Ware’s daughter began reading more than two grade levels above her grade, they tell InnovationMap.

But Progress Report isn’t designed simply to give a struggling student more work.

Take a student who appears to have difficulty with math.

The problem may not actually be math, the founders share. The student could understand the calculations but struggle to comprehend complex words used in a math problem.

Progress Report is designed to trace those performance patterns back to learning gaps, prerequisite skills or other instructional barriers. From there, it can recommend a next instructional step while leaving the educator in control.

The same concept applies to accommodations.

The system can read IEPs, 504 Plans, Present Levels of Academic Achievement and Functional Performance (PLAAFPs), evaluations and other special education records. Approved IEP goals can then be mapped into the student’s learning graph, while accommodations can carry over into lesson planning and question delivery.

The founders say that approach separates Progress Report from simply adding another artificial intelligence chatbot to a classroom. And still, they believe teachers have to remain at the center.

Teachers, in fact, helped build Progress Report.

The founders began meeting with Houston-area educators months before the pilot. Their feedback helped shape the platform before testing began.

“We’ve been building alongside these educators,” Ware says.

Parents are another piece.

Progress Report can give parents access to their child’s learning record so they can see learning gaps as they develop. Teachers can also see information on work being completed at home when the parent and educator are working together.

After the pilot wraps, Ware and Montanez plan to introduce a $29.99 monthly subscription for homeschool parents, teachers and other educators. They say the price was intentionally kept relatively low to help make the tools more accessible.

They are also exploring ways to work with organizations that could help families who can’t afford the platform.

Moving forward, the goal is considerably bigger.

Over the next five years, Ware and Montanez want Progress Report to become what they describe as a “gold standard” in every state. They know getting there will require building relationships with educators, technology leaders, policymakers and school board members.

For now, they’re starting with a few hundred students and a question that sounds simple but can be remarkably difficult to answer: Why is this student struggling?

If Progress Report works the way its founders envision, teachers and parents will have a clearer answer.

Pioneering cohousing development opens in Houston's historic 2nd Ward

Housing in Hou

An experimental, multi-generational building in the East End is now open and accepting residents. Only 10 of the 33 units remain available at East End Commons, the first project from CoHousing Houston.

Located at 115 Lenox, East End Commons was first conceived in 2017 and is designed to combine the security of home ownership with the community aspect of apartment life, essentially a condominium but with added focus on bringing neighbors together.

Units range from 900-2,000 square feet, offering ample private home space, but with a large Common House area and central courtyard for gatherings, working, and interaction. Large front porches encourage people to spend time outside where they can meet their neighbors, as do extensive foot paths for casual meetings.

"At East End Commons, you know your neighbors before you move in — so you have a network of people and spaces that are immediately there for you," said founding resident Kelli Soika. "We designed for larger shared spaces versus larger personal spaces in order to foster the breakdown of the barriers that lead to loneliness."

Combating loneliness and isolation is certainly necessary. A 2025 survey conducted by the American Psychological Association shows that most Americans feel a sense of societal division and lonely. A loss of "third spaces," where people gather outside the home or work, is a prime factor. East End Commons aims to alleviate some of that disconnectedness.

"I wanted to live in a neighborhood that is imbued with a sense of community above the individual, like we have all experienced in Houston during times of disaster recovery," said Lynn Morstead, one of East End Commons‘ founding residents. "In those instances, such as Hurricane Harvey, we surface from our separateness and come together in new and unexpected ways. With East End Commons, the goal is to translate that notion beyond a set period of time and make it a fixture of everyday life. I call it 'disaster-free neighborliness.'"

East End Commons was designed by Kathleen English of English + Associates. Sustainability is part of the project's design, with amenities such as geothermal heating and cooling exchange HVAC, pre-heated water systems, low-energy use air conditioning and heating, and native landscaping.

Prices for units range from $300,000 to the $900,000s, which can be more than double the home price in the rapidly gentrifying East End. HOA fees not only help maintain communal areas, they also cover shared internet, water, and other communal expenses. Similarly, government of the building is handled democratically via a community board that aims to make decisions by building consensus.

For more information, email info@cohousinghouston.com or call 832-900-2919.

MD Anderson president to retire after nine years, interim successor named

retirement plan

An era is ending at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.

On Aug. 26, Dr. Peter WT Pisters announced his plans to retire from his role as president of the comprehensive cancer center. He will work on a smooth transition of leadership with interim president Dr. Jeffrey E. Lee throughout September.

“I first arrived at UT MD Anderson 32 years ago with a passion for doing everything I could to advance our mission to end cancer. Serving as the only faculty member to become president, and now marking nine years in the role, I can say with great pride and gratitude that there is no better place than UT MD Anderson to turn hope into healing for patients and families everywhere,” Pisters said in a news release. “With a timeless strategy, a strong leadership team, unprecedented levels of financial health, and a priceless culture anchored in our deeply held Core Values, now is the right time for me to transition to other opportunities. UT MD Anderson has never been stronger, and its future has never been brighter.”

Pisters assumed the presidency in 2017 and helped launch some of the most cutting-edge new clinics in MD Anderson history. One of those was the James P. Allison Institute, named for the Nobel Laureate scientist who discovered a way to suppress immune response on tumors so that immune cells would attack cancer cells instead. As head of his titular clinic, Allison pioneered several new immunotherapies against cancer.

Pisters also oversaw the creation of the Institute for Data Science in Oncology in 2024, an innovative consortium of scientists dedicated to enhancing single-cell imaging to improve precision in cancer treatments. The institute also brought together teams to use data-driven analytics regarding safety, quality and access.

The UT System Board of Regents praised the leadership and work of Pisters in a statement, wishing him well in the next phase of his career.

“The Board of Regents and I are profoundly grateful to Dr. Pisters for his exceptional presidency over the past nine years and for thoughtfully concluding his service when UT MD Anderson is thriving at its best position of peak performance, strength and impact. We wish him our very best with his retirement and in his next chapter,” Kevin P. Eltife, chairman of the UT System Board of Regents, added in the release.

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