Data Gumbo closes $6M round, Alice partners with accelerator, and more Houston innovation news

Short stories

Blockchain-as-a-service company closes $6 million Series A round. Courtesy of Data Gumbo

Houston's innovation ecosystem has been busy, and the ongoing 50th anniversary of the Offshore Technology Conference has claimed a lot of attention in town lately. While I'm sure you've seen the big news pieces, like the Texas Medical Center's new details about TMC3 or WeWork's third Houston location, you may have missed some of these short stories.

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Data Gumbo closes a $6 million Series A round

Data Gumbo's executive team will use the round of funding to grow its operations. Courtesy of Data Gumbo

Data Gumbo Corp., a Houston-based blockchain-as-a-service company, completed a $6M Series A equity funding round. Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures — the venture subsidiary of Saudi Aramco — and Equinor Technology Ventures —the venture subsidiary of Equinor — co-led the round.

The new capital will be used to grow the company's commercial blockchain network, as well as Data Gumbo's technical, sales and marketing teams at their Houston headquarters and office in Stavanger, Norway. This Series A round brings Data Gumbo's total funding to $9.3 million.

"We enabled the first application of blockchain technology in the offshore drilling industry and will continue to break new ground with applications of BaaS to improve the bottom line of companies of all sizes. Blockchain will have a major impact on the oil and gas industry - and all global industries - and we will lead the charge in its broad adoption for sweeping operational improvements," says Andrew Bruce, CEO of Data Gumbo, in a release. "The partnership with Equinor and Saudi Aramco, and their associated supply chains and partnerships, will provide the momentum for the Data Gumbo BaaS network to gain critical mass." Learn more about Bruce and Data Gumbo here.

Alice and Founder Institute team up

Houston's new Founder Institute chapter has teamed up with Alice. Image courtesy Founder Institute

Pre-seed accelerator, the Founder Institute and Houston-based AI startup resource platform, Alice, announced a partnership to present the "Alice Fellowship" within the Founder Institute Program to help aspiring female founders build impactful and enduring startup companies.

The fellowship allows for female entrepreneurs in the Alice community to apply to the Houston FI program for free, waiving the $50 fee. The best applicants will then be selected to receive the fellowship for free as well. Interested female founders can apply https://fi.co/join/Alice before the application deadline of May 19.

Report shows how Houston fares as a startup city

Houston didn't rank among the best cities for startups — but it didn't make the worst either. Photo by Tim Leviston/Getty Images

Houston performed averagely on a new study from SimpleTexting. The report ranked cities based on their startups' performance — valuation of startups, startup jobs available, number of investors in the region, etc. Here's how Houston ranked. (Note: only the top and bottom 10 cities were ranked, and Houston doesn't appear on any of the top or bottom 10 lists.)

  • Average startup valuation: $4 million (This seems to be about the middle of the pack compared to other cities.)
  • Investor to startup ratio: 2.9 (Houston outranks Austin, which has a 1.5 ratio, in this category but seems to be closer to the bottom than the top.)
  • Startups per 100,000 people: 27.1 (Houston ranks pretty low on the spectrum for this. The 10th worst city is Rochester, New York, which has 17.8.)
  • Startup jobs per 100,000 people: 1.8 (Houston again falls closer to the bottom than the top with this number. The 10th worst city is Tuscon, Arizona, which has 0.88.)

While using different metrics, WalletHub found that Houston is a strong city to start a business. Read that story here.

Clean energy company awarded at EarthX

Trevor Best, CEO of Syzygy Plasmonics, walked away from EarthX $100,000 richer. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based Syzygy Plasmonics won $100,000 as one Texas' top CleanTech startup companies at the 2019 EarthX CleanTech Investment Challenge in Dallas. Syzygy is a chemicals startup out of Rice University, and one of their technologies focuses on hydrogen as a fuel option and alternative to gasoline.

TMCx company raises $5.14 million Series A

Philadelphia-based RoundTrip, which is in TMCx's current cohort, closed a hefty Series A round. Photo via roundtriphealth.com

An estimated 3.6 million patients miss or postpone their medical appointments annually, which leads to bigger medical issues that could have been prevented or treated earlier. Philadelphia-based RoundTrip created a platform where patients can book transportation to and from appointments. The startup, which is currently completing TMCx's digital health accelerator program, recently closed its Series A round of $5.14 million led by Motley Fool Ventures.

Houston energy professional publishes female-focused book

The new novel tells the stories of the women within the offshore oil and gas industries. Courtesy of Rebecca Ponton

Rebecca Ponton has published her series of 23 short biographies of women in the offshore oil and gas industry called, Breaking the GAS Ceiling: Women in the Offshore Oil & Gas Industry. Ponton timed the publication ahead of the 2019 Offshore Technology Conference. The book is available on Amazon.

The book features a number of Texas women, including:

  • Marni Zabarsky (MADCON Corp.)
  • Mieko Mahi (freelance petroleum photographer)
  • Alyssa Michalke (previously of TAMKO)
  • Jerry Tardivo Alcoser (works in Chevron's Bakersfield office, but has a home in Houston)
  • Melody Meyer, Katie Mehnert, and Ally Cedeno, who wrote endorsements for the book, live and work in Houston.

Houston O&G consulting company named Great Place to Work

oil and gas

EAG Services received a national recognition for its work environment and employee happiness. Getty Images

Great Place to Work and FORTUNE selected Houston-based EAG Services as one of the 2019 Best Workplaces in Consulting and Professional Services in the small to mid-sized company category. The rankings were based on employees' feedback. EAG Services took the Number 17 spot on the list.

"EAG Services is proud to be recognized by our people for creating one of the best workplaces in the consulting and professional services industry. Our ongoing commitment to keeping culture our priority as well as playing an ever-critical role in hiring has proven to be successful in attracting and building an empowering place to work," says Elizabeth Gerbal, CEO and Founder of EAG Services, in a release.

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Houston scientist wins prestigious Pew Scholar award for brain cancer research

standout scholar

Christina Tringides, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University, is one of 21 scientists to win a prestigious Pew Biomedical Scholar award.

She is the first faculty member from Rice to win the distinction, which provides $300,000 over four years for advances in biomedicine, according to the university. The awards are granted to researchers who are in the first few years at the assistant professor level.

In Tringides’ case, the funding will support her innovative new method of modeling glioblastoma, a common and extremely aggressive form of brain cancer. Thanks to producing its own blood supply, glioblastoma spreads quickly, weaving tendrils of blighted tissue throughout the brain. Because of this, surgery is difficult and conventional therapies ineffective.

Understanding the way glioblastoma spreads is crucial to the search for a cure. Tringides is using hydrogels that mimic the brain’s extracellular matrix. Using cultures and a microscopic labyrinth, her team can see how the cancer spreads, bonds with neurons and changes cell wall activity. Essentially, Tringides has devised an intelligence test for tumors in hopes of learning how to outsmart them.

“As cancer crawls through the maze, we can look at how it is interacting with the neurons more and more, and measure how electrical activity is changing as a result,” she said in a news release from Rice.

Examining how cancer cells grow can reveal which conditional changes slow them down. Finding ways to alter the structure of brain matter in a way that makes it inhospitable to the cancer could lead to therapies that would impede growth or even reverse it. Using her custom-made ersatz brain maze makes it easier to observe changes than it would be in a patient’s brain.

“Imaging synapses is time-intensive ⎯ it can involve large data files that are hard to visualize, but if we know that the only place where we might have a synapse is this tiny 1-by-4-by-10 micron channel, it makes it much faster and reliable to image them,” Tringides said.

Born in Ames, Iowa, Tringides received her doctorate in biophysics from Harvard before joining Rice in 2024 through a Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas (CPRIT) recruitment award.

Her research was also one of the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice Brain Institute and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

Texas residents earn 11th highest income in U.S., says 2026 study

Money Matters

A new WalletHub study comparing income disparities across America has ranked Texas residents No. 11 on the list of states with the highest earning residents in the nation.

The report, "States Where People Have the Highest Income (2026)," analyzed U.S. Census Bureau income data in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The report evaluated the average annual income of the top five percent, the median annual household income, and the average annual income of the bottom 20 percent of residents in every state, all adjusted for the cost of living.

The report's data revealed the top five percent of Texans, the highest earners, make $520,378 on average yearly after adjusting for the cost of living. That's the seventh-highest income among the top five percent of earners nationwide.

Meanwhile, the median annual income of a Texas household is just under $76,000. The bottom 20 percent of Texas residents make $17,651 a year, the report found.

For additional context, the latest data from the Federal Reserve shows an American household's median yearly income is about $83,700. WalletHub analyst Chip Lupo also found that the highest earning 10 percent of individuals in the U.S. earn over 12 times more than those in the lowest-earning 10 percent, based on the latest Census data.

"By measuring the income of various percentiles against a state's median income, we can better identify where income disparities are more prevalent, which could help us better understand why residents of certain states struggle more to make ends meet," said Lupo.

Virginia is the state where residents earn the highest income in the U.S., WalletHub said. Based on the report's findings, the top five percent of Virginians make $545,097 on average per year after adjusting for the cost of living. The median annual income of a Virginia household comes out to $95,339, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $19,671 annually on average.

Conversely, West Virginia is the state where people have the lowest income in the U.S. A West Virginia household makes a median annual income of $56,610, the third-lowest nationally, and the bottom 20 percent of residents make $13,260 on average per year, which is the fifth-lowest in the nation. The top five percent of West Virginians make $372,218 on average per year.

The top 10 states where residents have the highest income are:

  • No. 1 – Virginia
  • No. 2 – New York
  • No. 3 – New Jersey
  • No. 4 – Washington
  • No. 5 – Connecticut
  • No. 6 – Utah
  • No. 7 – Colorado
  • No. 8 – Minnesota
  • No. 9 – Illinois
  • No. 10 – Massachusetts

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

future focused

By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

  • Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
  • Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
  • Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
  • Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

  • No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • No. 105 SLB
  • No. 120 Baker Hughes
  • No. 125 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 158 NRG Energy
  • No. 176 Targa Resources
  • No. 185 Chevron
  • No. 195 Halliburton
  • No. 223 Coterra Energy
  • No. 229 Waste Management
  • No. 235 Exxon Mobil
  • No. 250 Kinder Morgan
  • No. 257 Quanta Services
  • No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
  • No. 285 Sysco
  • No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
  • No. 318 Camden Property Trust
  • No. 333 EOG Resources
  • No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
  • No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
  • No. 401 Crown Castle
  • No. 408 Phillips 66
  • No. 500 APA
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