More Houston-area hospital workers now have access to this Houston startup's mobile ordering platform. Image courtesy of Rivalry Tech

More Houston hospital workers now have access to on-demand mobile ordering thanks to a Houston startup.

Houston-based Rivalry Tech has rolled out its its mobile ordering platform, myEATz, into five of Houston Methodist's hospital cafes. The hospital employees can now order food and beverages from the myEATz app or web platform.

The platform is now available at: Houston Methodist The Woodlands Hospital, Houston Methodist West Hospital, Houston Methodist Clear Lake Hospital, Houston Methodist Continuing Care Hospital, and Houston Methodist Willowbrook Hospital.

"Employee wellness is especially important in healthcare as worker shortages, combined with fatigue, continue to be a concern," says Aaron Knape, CEO and co-founder of Rivalry Tech, in a news release. "MyEATz offers more than just access to onsite food and beverage options, it encourages employees to utilize their meal breaks to recharge and make the most of their break."

The expansion aligns with Rivalry's partnership with Aramark Healthcare+, which operates all of the dining operations at Houston Methodist.

“We are thrilled to expand our partnership with Rivalry Tech to bring mobile ordering to five additional Aramark Healthcare+ Houston Methodist locations," says Dave Hanson, vice president of operations at Aramark Healthcare+, in the release. "Our continued investment in technology is a testament to our commitment to providing exceptional service and convenience to our healthcare caregivers. With Rivalry Tech's myEATz platform and our operational expertise, we are confident in our ability to enhance the overall dining experience for our guests.”

Founded in 2018 as sEATz, an in-stadium ordering app, Rivalry Tech rebranded and introduced the myEATz concept last year. Since then, the company rolled out its new app and raised $3.5 million in funding to expand its technology into the health care hospitality space.

This new restaurant technology allows for eateries to upgrade to mobile ordering for no cost. Photo courtesy of Cloche

Houston restaurant tech now serving optimized mobile ordering

order up

A new Houston company has designed a platform that enables mobile ordering at no cost to restaurants.

Cloche, a mobile software platform named after the bell-shape dish cover that's known to come with room service orders, has launched in Houston and is currently looking for restaurants interested in utilizing their technology to upgrade their eatery with mobile ordering at no cost to the restaurant.

Alfredo Arvide, co-founder and managing director, tells InnovationMap that the idea for the platform came after the pandemic forced restaurateurs to quickly pivot to touch-free menus. Now that the consumer has adapted to scanning QR codes to view menus, the next step is to optimize ordering — something that will also help with the labor shortages that restaurants are now facing.

"Now is the time transform this industry by creating a better meal experience for the consumers, an easier job for the restaurant staff and a more efficient, more profitable business for restaurant owners," Arvide says.

Existing technology costs restaurants thousands, but Cloche takes its cut on the consumer side. Customers pay a small percentage of their total for a platform fee — something that costs significantly less than the tip they'd leave if they had a waiter serve their table.

"We want to put consumers in control of their meal experience by connecting consumer’s phones directly with the kitchens," Arvide says, noting that the platform allows for users to request refills, condiments, and more. "We also want to uphold the restaurants’ staff wellbeing. Our intention is not to have technology replace the human aspect of the restaurant experience but take it to the next level."

One Houston restaurant — Cascabel Mexican Vegan in Spring Branch — has already deployed the technology. The company is actively seeking new eateries to onboard the platform. Arvide says any restaurant can benefit from Cloche, but right now he things cafes and casual dining spots are primed for the platform.

"While the Cloche experience will come more natural for fast food, counter service, ghost kitchens and overall, less personal meal experiences, we are working hard on adapting our service to support everything, from food-trucks to more sophisticated upscale restaurants where we would expect – and encourage – the wait staff to shift their focus from taking food orders manually to delighting customers," Arvide says.

The software for the platform has been designed by Blue People, a Houston-based custom software development shop. The organization works with companies of all sizes looking to develop their own platform, including startups looking to build their MVPs and mobile apps. In addition to his role at Cloche, Arvide serves as chief innovation officer for Blue People.

Aaron Knape joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share how he's taking the sEATz platform into a new vertical. Photo courtesy of sEATz

Houston sportstech startup scales, plans expansion into health care

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 109

When sEATz launched, the startup was looking to provide a way for sports fans to order their beer and hotdog to their seat without having to miss a moment of a game. Over the years, the Houston company has expanded its technology to be a reliable platform for mobile order management in stadiums and arenas — and now Aaron Knape, co-founder and CEO, knows the technology can do so much more.

"We started this company with a focus on mobile ordering for sports and entertainment venues," Knape says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. "We've always known we wanted to get into other industry verticals, and one that stuck out, primarily because it's such a big deal in Houston, is the health care industry."

Knape says he and his co-founder, Marshall Law, let this idea be known to their vendor partners, and eventually sEATz got the right connection to a health care campus to try out a new product: MyEatz.

"What we're building now is a mobile ordering platform for these large health care campuses," Knape says, explaining that the campuses have thousands of employees with limited space and time for dining. "We're starting on our first pilots in the health care industry where we provide that mobile ordering platform and back-end support with our partner Aramark."

Among the first groups to pilot the new product is Houston Methodist, Knape says. The pilots should launch this quarter — either this month or next.

"This could be a much bigger market than sports and entertainment," Knape says. "Sports will continue to be our core market, but this will be a little less seasonal."

And, in light of the last 18 months, less averse to the effects of a shutdown of sports and entertainment. However, the sEATz team entered the COVID-19 pandemic with uncertainty — like most of the world — but the team was able to market sEATz mobile ordering platform as something crucial to bringing back fans in stadiums.

"Our goal was to go out and market ourselves and push the branding of 'we facilitate social distancing, mitigate crowds, and get rid of lines,'" Knape says on the show. "That really resonated with a lot of our clientbase."

Remarkably, sEATz even raised fresh funding amid the pandemic. In November of 2020, the startup closed an oversubscribed $1.6 million seed round led by Valedor Partners. Knape says he's currently focused on the company's to support scaling and growing the team by six or so new employees over the next few months.

"I tell the team that we're kind of coming out of stealth mode — I know we're not in a true stealth mode, but we haven't spent a lot of money on sales and marketing," Knape says. "Now it's time to start putting that emphasis on who we are, that we're here, and we're ready to take over."

Knape shares more on how sEATz is growing and the potential for Houston to build a sportstech niche within the innovation ecosystem on the podcast. Listen to the full interview below — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.


Houston-based Roovy Technologies has created a mobile app where people can control their dining experience completely from their phones. Photo via roovy.io

Growing Houston startup is digitizing the dining experience

Digital dinner

Imagine going into a popular restaurant, sitting down at an open table and controlling the entire dining experience from a smartphone.

That's food, drinks, and even dessert all ordered and paid for on a phone.

Prolific Houston-area restaurateur Ken Bridge had the vision to converge dining with technology by creating a digital solution to combat chronic wait times in restaurants.

That vision became the Roovy Technologies mobile app, a platform designed to create the ultimate convenience for gastronauts everywhere.

"Roovy was birthed out of frustration," says Bridge, the serial entrepreneur behind the Delicious Concepts restaurant group. "Years ago, we would typically have lines out the door, so I thought to myself, that with technology, there should be a way for a guest to come in and manage their experience entirely from their phone.

"I felt like guests could go in, get sat at a table and order their food from their phone and pay from their phone and call it a day. That's how the idea of Roovy was conceived."

Three years ago, after putting mock pages together, Bridge started attending South by Southwest Interactive in Austin for research and inspiration. That led to commissioning a local boutique development agency in Houston to build out Roovy's Minimum Viable Product or road map before creating a fully functional platform.

"Roovy is a platform that allows the user to order and pay entirely from their phone," says Bridge. "We will soon be the first company to have all three categories of this type of app: dine-in, take out and delivery."

Bridge deployed Roovy in his Japanese concept restaurant, Blackbird Izakaya, at 1221 W. 11th St. in the Heights several months ago to test out the app before rolling it out to several other restaurants.

"It's a work in progress like everything else," says Bridge, who hopes for Roovy to be deployed in 20 restaurants very soon, then 40. "Everyday we're going to have issues that we need to resolve. But for now, we'll build it, we'll test it, we'll learn and we'll continue to go back and work out the kinks and keep pushing forward from there."

Convenience — on both sides of the transaction

For users, the value proposition is to be able to order and pay from their phone.

"Even a really good server can be impeding at the same time, over-qualifying or checking too much on a table that it becomes a distraction," says Bridge. "With Roovy, when the user is ready to order they can. It's convenience-based technology."

For operators, it streamlines the entire process, up to and including payment.

"We built this as a native solution, so restaurants can technically operate their entire restaurant on one single iPad, while cutting out all hardware," says Bridge.

The restaurant's menu is fully interactive and constantly updated in the app.

When a user places an order, they can add notes to alert the kitchen or bar with their allergies or substitutions and the kitchen or bar receives the notice on the Kitchen Display Side.

That order is then colored and timed, depending on the restaurant's flow and the user then receives a page when the order is ready.

"When restaurant's not packed, they can prepare orders in four minutes, but when packed, it may take eight minutes," says Bridge. "So through the machine learning, they can input a flow time, but then the system intuitively will become more and more intelligent based on the number of tickets and how frequently the operator is stocking and selling a particular item."

Bridge funded Roovy with his own money, so running the cloud-based platform in his own restaurants provided another distinct advantage for his startup's bottom line. And, with operators running the Roovy platform, it has officially entered post-revenue valuation. Roovy's revenue, like other payments facilitators, comes from its restaurant clients.

With the method of payment tied into the app, users pay from their phone and Roovy processes that payment transaction between the user, operator and bank tied to that payment method for a processing fee, much like a point-of-sale provider would with traditional POS devices.

Increasing opportunities for sales

What separates Roovy from other processors, though, is more than just the disruption of bulky hardware, printers and other equipment that can be very expensive for the operator.

It's the ability to maximize sales through convenience.

Case in point: in a busy restaurant, customers who have finished their meal, but possibly have cravings for another drink or a dessert might choose to eschew the urge based on the availability of their wait staff or the line at the bar.

But with Roovy, they could simply add the additional food item or drink to their cart, and have it at their table in no time.

"A lot of restaurants are not taking advantage of opportunities to maximize their sales," says Bridge. "If the per person average for a particular restaurant is $20, the likelihood that there are customers that want one more beer but don't want to go through the motions of ordering it based on service not being around is high. They're going to just leave and the restaurant just missed out on a potential $6.

"That would have been a 30 percent increase in sales," Bridge continues. "So, because of Roovy's ease of use, restaurants can increase their per person revenue and we guarantee an increase of 19 or 20 percent for operators that use our platform."

An additional revenue stream for Roovy centers on its pinpointed marketing campaigns designed to push promotions to its users based on user data and analytics.

"We can help operators run promotions for our users that can be very specific to the demographic of their choice," says Bridge. "They can be very direct and specific push notifications that go out to users based on location, vicinity or proximity, for example. We could also push notifications to a restaurant's repeat customers."

More features to come

For users that want take out, Roovy will be working with predictive arrival technology to estimate better execution times for orders so that they will be as fresh as possible for customer pickup.

Roovy will also be adding "Roovy Coin," a loyalty and rewards programs, as well as a social component for those users that like to share their experience with their friends.

"Beyond this super unique emerging technology, we are building heavily on the sociability aspects of it," says Bridge. "For example, users will be able to check in with friends, plan potential meetups, share video clips with their friends and the community on the platform and be able to review restaurants.

"I kid about this all the time, but most of us remember two things: the first kiss we had and the first time we used Uber. We'll never forget that. Our goal is to come in with that same kind of impact and convince users and operators that Roovy is not just a great technology, it's the inevitable technology that will be adopted on mass levels."

Houston-based Grab makes it so you're waiting in one less line at the airport. Getty Images

Houston-based travel software company closes multimillion-dollar Series A and plans growth

Just plane convenient

When you fly, you can definitely rely on the fact that you're going to encounter two things: long airport walks and even longer airport lines. This Houston startup is ensuring that you have less of both of those.

Grab is a mobile software company that's designed an app where travelers can see what eateries they are going to pass in their airport visit and order their meal from their phone. The company has also expanded on their technology to include restaurant kiosks and mobile ordering from the table.

Grab was founded by Mark Bergsrud, who worked in senior leadership roles for almost 20 years at Continental Airlines and then United Airlines, following the merger. For Bergsrud, Grab feels like another major mobile game changer the industry experienced.

"I spent many years thinking about the travel experience and how to make it better and faster," Bergsrud says. "This feels like how mobile check in felt. There was a problem customers didn't know they had — check in wasn't that difficult anyway, but to be able to have that control, people love it."

Grab launched in the Atlanta airport in 2015 and now has a presence in 37 airports around the world, including Dallas and Austin though, ironically, not yet either of Houston's airports. Expansion is in the works, says Bergsrud.

"Our strategy is to build a ubiquitous network of partners, marketplace, and restaurants at all major airports," he says.

Also included in Grab's growth plans is to white label the software to include it in existing travel apps, like airline apps. Grab is already integrated into the American Airlines app.

"We don't want customers to have to work hard to figure out they can take advantage of this," Bergsrud says.

Grab, which has grown to a team of 20 people based in Headquarters in EaDo, has new resources to continue its growth. London-based Collinson Group was the sole contributor to Grab's multimillion-dollar Series A round, which closed last week. Along with financial support, the company, which is best known for its Priority Pass lounge membership program, also offers a huge network of partners and years of travel experience.

"We've called ourselves a startup for a long time, and now we think of ourselves as more of a scale-up company," Bergsrud says. "Now it's about having the money to scale faster."

As for where Grab will be scaling, Bergsrud says they are focused on the top 30 airports based on enplanements — including Hobby Airport and George Bush Intercontinental Airport — as well as creating more partnerships with airlines.

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New Houston biotech co. developing capsules for hard-to-treat tumors

biotech breakthroughs

Houston company Sentinel BioTherapeutics has made promising headway in cancer immunotherapy for patients who don’t respond positively to more traditional treatments. New biotech venture creation studio RBL LLC (pronounced “rebel”) recently debuted the company at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago.

Rima Chakrabarti is a neurologist by training. Though she says she’s “passionate about treating the brain,” her greatest fervor currently lies in leading Sentinel as its CEO. Sentinel is RBL’s first clinical venture, and Chakrabarti also serves as cofounder and managing partner of the venture studio.

The team sees an opportunity to use cytokine interleukin-2 (IL-2) capsules to fight many solid tumors for which immunotherapy hasn't been effective in the past. “We plan to develop a pipeline of drugs that way,” Chakrabarti says.

This may all sound brand-new, but Sentinel’s research goes back years to the work of Omid Veiseh, director of the Rice Biotechnology Launch Pad (RBLP). Through another, now-defunct company called Avenge Bio, Veiseh and Paul Wotton — also with RBLP and now RBL’s CEO and chairman of Sentinel — invested close to $45 million in capital toward their promising discovery.

From preclinical data on studies in mice, Avenge was able to manufacture its platform focused on ovarian cancer treatments and test it on 14 human patients. “That's essentially opened the door to understanding the clinical efficacy of this drug as well as it's brought this to the attention of the FDA, such that now we're able to continue that conversation,” says Chakrabarti. She emphasizes the point that Avenge’s demise was not due to the science, but to the company's unsuccessful outsourcing to a Massachusetts management team.

“They hadn't analyzed a lot of the data that we got access to upon the acquisition,” explains Chakrabarti. “When we analyzed the data, we saw this dose-dependent immune activation, very specific upregulation of checkpoints on T cells. We came to understand how effective this agent could be as an immune priming agent in a way that Avenge Bio hadn't been developing this drug.”

Chakrabarti says that Sentinel’s phase II trials are coming soon. They’ll continue their previous work with ovarian cancer, but Chakrabarti says that she also believes that the IL-2 capsules will be effective in the treatment of endometrial cancer. There’s also potential for people with other cancers located in the peritoneal cavity, such as colorectal cancer, gastrointestinal cancer and even primary peritoneal carcinomatosis.

“We're delivering these capsules into the peritoneal cavity and seeing both the safety as well as the immune activation,” Chakrabarti says. “We're seeing that up-regulation of the checkpoint that I mentioned. We're seeing a strong safety signal. This drug was very well-tolerated by patients where IL-2 has always had a challenge in being a well-tolerated drug.”

When phase II will take place is up to the success of Sentinel’s fundraising push. What we do know is that it will be led by Amir Jazaeri at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Part of the goal this summer is also to create an automated cell manufacturing process and prove that Sentinel can store its product long-term.

“This isn’t just another cell therapy,” Chakrabarti says.

"Sentinel's cytokine factory platform is the breakthrough technology that we believe has the potential to define the next era of cancer treatment," adds Wotton.

How Houston's innovation sector fared in 2025 Texas legislative session

That's a Wrap

The Greater Houston Partnership is touting a number of victories during the recently concluded Texas legislative session that will or could benefit the Houston area. They range from billions of dollars for dementia research to millions of dollars for energy projects.

“These wins were only possible through deep collaboration, among our coalition partners, elected officials, business and community leaders, and the engaged members of the Partnership,” according to a partnership blog post. “Together, we’ve demonstrated how a united voice for Houston helps drive results that benefit all Texans.”

In terms of business innovation, legislators carved out $715 million for nuclear, semiconductor, and other economic development projects, and a potential $1 billion pool of tax incentives through 2029 to support research-and-development projects. The partnership said these investments “position Houston and Texas for long-term growth.”

Dementia institute

One of the biggest legislative wins cited by the Greater Houston Partnership was passage of legislation sponsored by Sen. Joan Huffman, a Houston Republican, to provide $3 billion in funding over 10 years for the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. Voters will be asked in November to vote on a ballot initiative that would set aside $3 billion for the new institute.

The dementia institute would be structured much like the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT), a state agency that provides funding for cancer research in the Lone Star State. Since its founding in 2008, CPRIT has awarded nearly $3.9 billion in research grants.

“By establishing the Dementia Prevention and Research Institute of Texas, we are positioning our state to lead the charge against one of the most devastating health challenges of our time,” Huffman said. “With $3 billion in funding over the next decade, we will drive critical research, develop new strategies for prevention and treatment, and support our healthcare community. Now, it’s up to voters to ensure this initiative moves forward.”

More than 500,000 Texans suffer from some form of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, according to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.

“With a steadfast commitment, Texas has the potential to become a world leader in combating [dementia] through the search for effective treatments and, ultimately, a cure,” Patrick said.

Funding for education

In the K-12 sector, lawmakers earmarked an extra $195 million for Houston ISD, $126.7 million for Cypress-Fairbanks ISD, $103.1 million for Katy ISD, $80.6 million for Fort Bend ISD, and $61 million for Aldine ISD, the partnership said.

In higher education, legislators allocated:

     
  • $1.17 billion for the University of Houston College of Medicine, University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, and Baylor College of Medicine
  • $922 million for the University of Houston System
  • $167 million for Texas Southern University
  • $10 million for the Center for Biotechnology at San Jacinto College.

Infrastructure

In the infrastructure arena, state lawmakers:

     
  • Approved $265 million for Houston-area water and flood mitigation projects, including $100 million for the Lynchburg Pump Station
  • Created the Lake Houston Dredging and Maintenance District
  • Established a fund for the Gulf Coast Protection District to supply $550 million for projects to make the coastline and ship channel more resilient

"Nuclear power renaissance"

House Bill 14 (HB 14) aims to lead a “nuclear power renaissance in the United States,” according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s office. HB 14 establishes the Texas Advanced Nuclear Energy Office, and allocates $350 million for nuclear development and deployment. Two nuclear power plants currently operate in Texas, generating 10 percent of the energy that feeds the Electric Reliability Council Texas (ERCOT) power grid.

“This initiative will also strengthen Texas’ nuclear manufacturing capacity, rebuild a domestic fuel cycle supply chain, and train the future nuclear workforce,” Abbott said in a news release earlier this year.

One of the beneficiaries of Texas’ nuclear push could be Washington, D.C.-based Last Energy, which plans to build 30 micro-nuclear reactors near Abilene to serve power-gobbling data centers across the state. Houston-based Pelican Energy Partners also might be able to take advantage of the legislation after raising a $450 million fund to invest in companies that supply nuclear energy services and equipment.

Reed Clay, president of the Texas Nuclear Alliance, called this legislation “the most important nuclear development program of any state.”

“It is a giant leap forward for Texas and the United States, whose nuclear program was all but dead for decades,” said Clay. “With the passage of HB 14 and associated legislation, Texas is now positioned to lead a nuclear renaissance that is rightly seen as imperative for the energy security and national security of the United States.”

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A version of this article first appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Microsoft partners with Rice University's OpenStax on AI teaching tool

group project

Rice University’s OpenStax and Microsoft are partnering to integrate the nonprofit’s content with the tech giant’s AI innovation, known as Learning Zone.

“At OpenStax, our mission is to make an amazing education accessible to all,” Richard G. Baraniuk, founder and director of OpenStax, said in a news release. “That’s why we’re excited to integrate our trustworthy, peer-reviewed content with Microsoft’s AI technology through the Microsoft Learning Zone. Together, we aim to help more instructors and their students access engaging, effective learning experiences in new and dynamic ways. We also share a strong commitment to the thoughtful and responsible application of AI to better ensure all learners can succeed.”

OpenStax is a provider of affordable instructional technologies and is also one of the world’s largest publishers of open educational resources (OER).

Microsoft Learning Zone promises to provide educators and students with “responsible AI technology and peer-reviewed educational content to support learning” on Microsoft Copilot+ PCs. Microsoft Learning Zone works by utilizing on-device AI to generate interactive lessons for students, and its integration with OpenStax content means educators can rely on OpenStax’s digital library of 80 openly licensed titles.

The goal is for educators to create effective and engaging learning experiences safely, thereby bypassing the need to source and vet content independently. Included is a library of ready-to-use lessons, opportunity for immediate feedback and differentiated learning. Educators will maintain control of instructional content and pedagogical strategies and will be able to update or edit lessons or activities prior to sharing them with students.

Other tools included in the Microsoft Learning Zone are additional languages, reading coaching, public speaking help, math and reading progress, and a partnership with the online quiz platform Kahoot!

OpenStax resources have been reported as used across 153 countries, and this current collaboration combines the power and potential of responsible AI usage in education with content that has been utilized by 13,569 K-12 schools and 71 percent of U.S. colleges and universities, according to Rice.

“Through our partnership with OpenStax, we’re combining the power of on-device AI in Copilot+ PCs with OpenStax’s trusted and diverse peer-reviewed content to help educators quickly create high-quality, personalized, engaging lessons,” Deirdre Quarnstrom, vice president of Microsoft Education, added in the news release. “We’re excited about how this collaboration will empower classrooms globally.”