Female founders win big at this Houston health tech pitch competition

pitch perfect

Ria Health took home first place at the third annual Fire Pitch Competition. Courtesy of Ignite Healthcare

All it takes is a spark for something to ignite, and, at the third annual Fire Pitch Competition by the Ignite Healthcare Network, eight female founders set the stage on fire.

The Fire Pitch Competition first started in 2017 to shine a spotlight on female entrepreneurs in health care. With two successful events under her belt, Ayse McCracken says she knew she could do more to help these women with their business ideas.

"What we discovered is that it's not enough. Startups get to pitch all over, and they want to invest their time wisely," McCracken says. "And it's not enough for the rest of the ecosystem — the customers — and the investors want companies that actually are investable."

So, this summer, McCracken and her team launched a mini accelerator. Thirteen companies participated in the Fire Pitch Customer-Partner Program that matched the companies with potential customers, pilot opportunities, and more. Participating customer organizations have included Humana, Houston Methodist, Memorial Hermann Health System, Gallagher, Texas Children's Hospital, Texas Children's Pediatrics, DePelchin, Next Level Urgent Care, University of Houston College of Medicine, VillageMD, and The Menninger Clinic.

Then, eight finalists of the group were selected to go on to pitch at the Fire Pitch.

Also new this year: More cash prizes. In previous years, the Fire Pitch has around $20,000 on the table. This year's awards doled out $265,000 in cash and investment prizes to six of the eight companies that pitched. The panel of five judges included: Babs Carryer, entrepreneur, and director of Big Idea Center for the University of Pittsburgh's Innovation Institute; Tom Luby, director of the Texas Medical Center Innovation Institute; Kerry Rupp, partner at True Wealth Ventures; Sarah Sossong, principal at Flare Capital Partners; and Andrew Truscott, managing director for Health and Public Service at Accenture.

Here's which companies took home prizes at the 2019 Fire Pitch Competition at the Texas Medical Center's Innovation Institute on October 17.

First place: Ria Health

Ria Health, a San Francisco-based elemental health practice that uses technology and care to provide treatment for Alcohol Use Disorder, was the big winner at the pitch event.

Jen Douglas, CFO of the company, took home first place and the $15,000 prize from Ignite Healthcare Network, but the company also snagged one of the new awards this year. The Texas Medical Center's Innovation Institute awarded Ria Health with a $50,000 investment prize. Ria Health previously participated in the TMCx08 digital health cohort, so the team is very familiar with Houston and the TMC.

Second place: SoundScouts

Sydney, Australia-based SoundScouts is on a mission to help early detection of hearing in school aged children. Carolyn Mee, founder and CEO, represented the company on the stage. She took home second place, which didn't come with an investment or cash prize.

Third place: Savonix

Savonix also didn't walk away with any money, but was recognized by the judges for founder and CEO Mylea Charvet's pitch. The San Francisco-based company is a digital cognitive assessment platform that can easily and cheaply gauge cognitive function.

Texas Halo Fund $100,000 award: PATH EX

The biggest winner of the night based on investment size was Houston-based PATH EX. Led by CEO and co-founder, Sinead Miller, PATH EX has a solution to hospitals' biggest killers: Sepsis. The current TMCx company has a unique pathogen extraction platform that can directly capture and eradicate bacteria.

Miller accepted a new award for this year's program that came with a $100,000 investment from the Texas Halo Fund.

Texas Halo Fund $50,000 award: PyrAmes 

One award wasn't enough for the Texas Halo Fund, which handed out a second new award to Cupertino, California-based PyrAmes. Presented by co-founder and CTO, Xina Quan, the company has created a wearable blood pressure monitor that is reliable and nonintrusive to patients. Quan accepted the $50,000 investment from the fund.

Houston Angel Network $50,000 award: Materna Medical 

San Francisco-base Materna Medical, which created a device to help protect and prepare expecting mothers' pelvic health ahead of childbirth, took home the last investment prize. President and CEO Tracy MacNeal presented the company and accepted the Houston Angel Network's $50,000 award.

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Houston researchers make headway on affordable, sustainable sodium-ion battery

Energy Solutions

A new study by researchers from Rice University’s Department of Materials Science and NanoEngineering, Baylor University and the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research Thiruvananthapuram has introduced a solution that could help develop more affordable and sustainable sodium-ion batteries.

The findings were recently published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The team worked with tiny cone- and disc-shaped carbon materials from oil and gas industry byproducts with a pure graphitic structure. The forms allow for more efficient energy storage with larger sodium and potassium ions, which is a challenge for anodes in battery research. Sodium and potassium are more widely available and cheaper than lithium.

“For years, we’ve known that sodium and potassium are attractive alternatives to lithium,” Pulickel Ajayan, the Benjamin M. and Mary Greenwood Anderson Professor of Engineering at Rice, said in a news release. “But the challenge has always been finding carbon-based anode materials that can store these larger ions efficiently.”

Lithium-ion batteries traditionally rely on graphite as an anode material. However, traditional graphite structures cannot efficiently store sodium or potassium energy, since the atoms are too big and interactions become too complex to slide in and out of graphite’s layers. The cone and disc structures “offer curvature and spacing that welcome sodium and potassium ions without the need for chemical doping (the process of intentionally adding small amounts of specific atoms or molecules to change its properties) or other artificial modifications,” according to the study.

“This is one of the first clear demonstrations of sodium-ion intercalation in pure graphitic materials with such stability,” Atin Pramanik, first author of the study and a postdoctoral associate in Ajayan’s lab, said in the release. “It challenges the belief that pure graphite can’t work with sodium.”

In lab tests, the carbon cones and discs stored about 230 milliamp-hours of charge per gram (mAh/g) by using sodium ions. They still held 151 mAh/g even after 2,000 fast charging cycles. They also worked with potassium-ion batteries.

“We believe this discovery opens up a new design space for battery anodes,” Ajayan added in the release. “Instead of changing the chemistry, we’re changing the shape, and that’s proving to be just as interesting.”

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This story originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

FAA demands investigation into SpaceX's out-of-control Starship flight

Out of this world

The Federal Aviation Administration is demanding an accident investigation into the out-of-control Starship flight by SpaceX on May 27.

Tuesday's test flight from Texas lasted longer than the previous two failed demos of the world's biggest and most powerful rocket, which ended in flames over the Atlantic. The latest spacecraft made it halfway around the world to the Indian Ocean, but not before going into a spin and breaking apart.

The FAA said Friday that no injuries or public damage were reported.

The first-stage booster — recycled from an earlier flight — also burst apart while descending over the Gulf of Mexico. But that was the result of deliberately extreme testing approved by the FAA in advance.

All wreckage from both sections of the 403-foot (123-meter) rocket came down within the designated hazard zones, according to the FAA.

The FAA will oversee SpaceX's investigation, which is required before another Starship can launch.

CEO Elon Musk said he wants to pick up the pace of Starship test flights, with the ultimate goal of launching them to Mars. NASA needs Starship as the means of landing astronauts on the moon in the next few years.

TMC med-tech company closes $2.5M series A, plans expansion

fresh funding

Insight Surgery, a United Kingdom-based startup that specializes in surgical technology, has raised $2.5 million in a series A round led by New York City-based life sciences investor Nodenza Venture Partners. The company launched its U.S. business in 2023 with the opening of a cleanroom manufacturing facility at Houston’s Texas Medical Center.

The startup says the investment comes on the heels of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granting clearance to the company’s surgical guides for orthopedic surgery. Insight says the fresh capital will support its U.S. expansion, including one new manufacturing facility at an East Coast hospital and another at a West Coast hospital.

Insight says the investment “will provide surgeons with rapid access to sophisticated tools that improve patient outcomes, reduce risk, and expedite recovery.”

Insight’s proprietary digital platform, EmbedMed, digitizes the surgical planning process and allows the rapid design and manufacturing of patient-specific guides for orthopedic surgery.

“Our mission is to make advanced surgical planning tools accessible and scalable across the U.S. healthcare system,” Insight CEO Henry Pinchbeck said in a news release. “This investment allows us to accelerate our plan to enable every orthopedic surgeon in the U.S. to have easy access to personalized surgical devices within surgically meaningful timelines.”

Ross Morton, managing Partner at Nodenza, says Insight’s “disruptive” technology may enable the company to become “the leader in the personalized surgery market.”

The startup recently entered a strategic partnership with Ricoh USA, a provider of information management and digital services for businesses. It also has forged partnerships with the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City, University of Chicago Medicine, University of Florida Health and UAB Medicine in Birmingham, Alabama.

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