Austin Rolling, Gabriella Rowe, and Aaron Knape are this week's Houston innovators to know. Photos courtesy

In this weekly roundup of Houston innovators, we find an entrepreneur who created the tech solution he wished he'd had as a salesman, an innovation leader with big goals for The Ion, and a startup founder who's in for a very busy March.

Here are this week's Houston innovators to know.

Austin Rolling, CEO and co-founder of Outfield

austin rolling

Photo courtesy of Outfield

As an experienced salesman, Austin Rolling knows the challenges salespeople face on a daily basis. Rolling, who worked in a number of positions in both inside and outside sales with such big name companies as Whirlpool and Beats by Dre. He tells InnovationMap about how he wished he had better tools for communication and keeping organized.

"Fast forward some years later, my co-founder and I decided to work on a solution that could help support outside sales agents and I was able to use my domain expertise as an outside sales rep to ID the realm of solutions for various customer segments," Rolling says.

Rolling runs Outfield, a Houston-based software company gives field reps an intuitive interface to manage their territory and accounts on-the-go as well as instantly communicate with the rest of their team effortlessly across all devices. Click here to read more.

Gabriella Rowe, executive director of The Ion

Courtesy of Station Houston

Now that Station Houston has merged with Capital Factory, Gabriella Rowe, who previously served Station as CEO, has completely transitioned into her role as executive director of The Ion. On last week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast, Rowe discussed the merger and how her goal for The Ion is to make the facility a vehicle for innovation development, but also create a diverse and inclusive environment reflective of Houston's own diversity.

"We're creating an opportunity for Houstonians," Rowe says on the episode, explaining why she's focused on bringing in a wide range of programming and education into The Ion.

In the episode, Rowe also discusses the Ion Smart Cities Accelerators, which has 10 companies from its inaugural cohort in pilot mode across Houston and has launched applications for its second cohort, as well as why she thinks Houston's innovation ecosystem is sure to succeed this time around. Click here to read more and stream the podcast.

Aaron Knape, co-founder and CEO of sEATz

Courtesy of sEATz

Like most lifelong Houstonians, Aaron Knape has a long history with the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo. But this season, he'll be involved in a whole new way. Knape's startup, sEATz, an in-seat delivery app, will be live in certain sections of the rodeo at NRG Stadium.

"It's really great to be able to be a part of the rodeo as far as a provider to help enhance that experience in the stadium," Knape says. "It goes back to our model of we want to serve a venue and the fans in that venue — not necessarily a specific sport or concert."

SEATz had a busy football season, servicing the likes of The Texans, the University of Houston Cougars, and more, but turns out, football is not over. Through its partnership with Delaware North, the food and beverage provider for UH's TDECU Stadium, sEATz has added the XFL's Houston Roughnecks fans to its roster of users. Click here to read more.

Houston-based Outfield, a sales management app, wants to gamify the sales process for its users. Photo via outfieldapp.com

Growing Houston startup is gamifying professional sales with management tools for sellers

Always be gaming

Actor Alec Baldwin's "always be closing" monologue is not only the most popular scene in David Mamet's 1992 film, "Glengarry Glen Ross," it has become the unofficial mantra for sales professionals worldwide.

While that ABC line, the art of persuasion and strong product offerings are necessary pillars in sales, the ability to centralize data and foster accountability, productivity and drive revenue is just as vital. That's where Outfield, a web and mobile-based CRM, comes in. The app specializes in data driven revenue and efficiency solutions for companies with a burgeoning outside sales force.

"Outfield is a software solution designed specifically to support organizations to drive revenue, generate efficiencies and build operational structures via outside sales, field marketing efforts and field merchandising efforts," says Austin Rolling, CEO and co-founder of Outfield.

"For example, the merchandising that seen in a grocery store where sales reps are taking pictures of displays, dropping off marketing collateral, setting up demos and setting up tastings, those are the types of programs where individuals will likely use our software solutions in order to manage their workflow operations," Rolling adds.

How it works

Outfield's selling point revolves around helping organizations discover valuable insights about their market vertical, track and verify their sales team's activity and manage their field operations.

Simply put, it gives field reps an intuitive interface to manage their territory and accounts on-the-go as well as instantly communicate with the rest of their team effortlessly across all devices.

Outfield makes it easier for sales teams to keep track of projects and clients. Photo via outfieldapp.com

"Prior to starting Outfield, I worked in a number of sales positions, both outside and inside sales positions," says Rolling, who worked in sales with such big name companies as Whirlpool and Beats by Dre. "When I was in outside sales, I was always underwhelmed with the amount of support and solutions we were provided while we were out in the field. I always knew there was an opportunity there because the tools that we had were lacking in terms of capabilities.

"Fast forward some years later, my co-founder and I decided to work on a solution that could help support outside sales agents and I was able to use my domain expertise as an outside sales rep to ID the realm of solutions for various customer segments."

Rolling founded Outfield with co-founder Adam Steele in 2015 and operates out of The Cannon, an entrepreneurial co-working space specifically designed to house Houston-based startups and small businesses.

Management tools for sellers

The company began as a solution for a nutraceutical and supplement company called Cellucor.

Cellucor needed an efficient way to manage its legion of outside sales reps, which were servicing stores like Vitamin Shoppe and GNC where they worked with the in-store representatives to promote their brand products.

The company also wanted to track the whereabouts of its sales reps, monitor their touch points in the field and centralize the teams' reports and call forms.

"Sales reps are able to manage their relationships and interactions with their customers through the tool," says Rolling. "We can also integrate with our customers' inside sales tool if they have one. We can send our data over to other systems. It depends on whether or not the system that we are looking to integrate with actually has an open API that we can transmit data from our system to theirs.

"In terms of sales numbers and touch points that you have with customers, there's a report that outside sales reps need to fill out while out in the field. They can record all of the information then sync that data into the cloud, so the sales manager or sales director can see all of that data from the web-based version of Outfield."

Rolling's intimate understanding of the needs of outside sales reps and knowledge of the industry vertical has been immeasurable in growing Outfield's client base, which has expanded to over 200 customers in 75 countries.

Gamifying sales

Over the next five years, the burgeoning startup plans to build on its momentum as a disruptor in the space by incubating and releasing a new suite of products that will ultimately have a number of synergies with Outfield.

The most pressing product is League Play, a built-in game for salespeople within the Outfield CRM platform that allows sales reps the opportunity to compete and collaborate with one another similar to popular video games such as MLB The Show 20 or NBA 2K20.

"League Play essentially allows reps to build reputations of being star performers based on their utilization and activity of their Outfield account," says Rolling. "They're able to leverage that data and this will be good for comparison purposes for upper management. Therefore, if a sales manager or sales director wants to know who their star player is, they can go into League Play see how their sales reps are performing. We designed it to be very reminiscent of sports."

The tool has leaderboards and signature player cards, which is similar to Topps baseball cards. The player cards features the sales reps' profile, including all of the statistics of their individual performance and offer attributes.

"Like Madden, you can go in and see how their ratings are," says Rolling. "This is something that's going to be groundbreaking. This is something that has not been done before. The idea is to be sales as a sport to take advantage of sales reps' competitive nature. It should boost their overall productivity, which managers should be able to reap the benefits of, while reps will be able to build their own brand and personal reputation. It's a great way to boost performance overall."

All sales reps that utilize Outfield will be automatically entered into League Play. While the platform allows sales reps the chance to feel like they're athletes, it also helps them build reputations for themselves as top tier sales professionals and give them more of a vested interest in utilizing the application.

Moving forward, Outfield wants to further permeate the market in its widespread use of advanced analytics with the help of artificial intelligence and machine learning.

"We want to be able to think about KPI's and metrics that can tell the story of outside sales in a very specific way," says Rolling. "We think that we can infuse and generate an appetite for people who want to think more intelligently about their go-to-market activities because one thing we're learning and know for sure is that our customers aren't getting less competitive, they're getting more competitive."

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Axiom Space-tested cancer drug advances to clinical trials

mission critical

A cancer-fighting drug tested aboard several Axiom Space missions is moving forward to clinical trials.

Rebecsinib, which targets a cancer cloning and immune evasion gene, ADAR1, has received FDA approval to enter clinical trials under active Investigational New Drug (IND) status, according to a news release. The drug was tested aboard Axiom Mission 2 (Ax-2) and Axiom Mission 3 (Ax-3). It was developed by Aspera Biomedicine, led by Dr. Catriona Jamieson, director of the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute (SSCI).

The San Diego-based Aspera team and Houston-based Axiom partnered to allow Rebecsinib to be tested in microgravity. Tumors have been shown to grow more rapidly in microgravity and even mimic how aggressive cancers can develop in patients.

“In terms of tumor growth, we see a doubling in growth of these little mini-tumors in just 10 days,” Jamieson explained in the release.

Rebecsinib took part in the patient-derived tumor organoid testing aboard the International Space Station. Similar testing is planned to continue on Axiom Station, the company's commercial space station that's currently under development.

Additionally, the drug will be tested aboard Ax-4 under its active IND status, which was targeted to launch June 25.

“We anticipate that this monumental mission will inform the expanded development of the first ADAR1 inhibitory cancer stem cell targeting drug for a broad array of cancers," Jamieson added.

According to Axiom, the milestone represents the potential for commercial space collaborations.

“We’re proud to work with Aspera Biomedicines and the UC San Diego Sanford Stem Cell Institute, as together we have achieved a historic milestone, and we’re even more excited for what’s to come,” Tejpaul Bhatia, the new CEO of Axiom Space, said in the release. “This is how we crack the code of the space economy – uniting public and private partners to turn microgravity into a launchpad for breakthroughs.”