3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Moji Karimi of Cemvita Factory, Shanna Jin of Rice University, and Trent Crow of Real Simple Energy. Courtesy photos

Editor's note: In the week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — data science, consumer tech, and medical device innovation — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Moji Karimi, co-founder and CEO of Cemvita Factory

Moji Karimi joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss how his technology is offering energy execs an innovative way to meat their climate change pledge goals. Photo courtesy of Cemvita

A lot of startups are working on technology that makes existing practices more efficient, cheaper, or faster — or all of the above. But Cemvita Factory, founded by siblings Moji and Tara Karimi, is doing something that's never been done before: biomimicking photosynthesis to convert carbon emissions into useful chemicals.

"There weren't biotech companies working with oil and gas companies for this use case that we have now," Moji Karimi says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast. "We're defining this new category for application of synthetic biology in heavy industries for decarbonization."

With this uncharted territory comes unique challenges and opportunities. Click here to read more and stream the episode.

Shanna Jin, communications and marketing specialist of the Data to Knowledge Lab at Rice University

Startups and small businesses are accumulating data daily — here's how to use that to your advantage, according to this Houston expert. Photo via rice.edu

Ironically, the power of data management is almost incalculable. With the right practices and processes in place, businesses can make better decisions and grow more strategically. But, it's not something a lot of startups or small businesses look at regularly. That's where the Rice University Data To Knowledge group comes into play.

"Being able to interpret data and making data-driven decisions becomes the key to the success of a business," writes Shanna Jin in a guest column for InnovationMap. "It is not just a privilege for big companies anymore. Small businesses need it more than ever to make sustainable growth in the digital era." Click here to read more.

Trent Crow, founder and president of Real Simple Energy

Trent Crow, founder and president, and the Real Simple Energy team have moved over to Arcardia with the acquisition. Photo courtesy of Real Simple Energy

Earlier this month, a Houston startup exited to a larger tech company. Trent Crow, co-founder and CEO of Real Simply Energy, says all eight of the company's employees have moved over to Arcadia and more workers will be hired soon. The company has maintained a mix of office and remote workers. Arcadia will look for Houston office space later this year, Crow says.

"Expansion plans include doing more of what we're doing now and offering more features for customers," says Crow, who now is Arcadia's general manager of energy services in Texas. Click here to read more.

Startups and small businesses are accumulating data daily — here's how to use that to your advantage. Photo via Getty Images

Houston expert: How to use the power of data and analytics to inform ​small businesses​

Guest column

Starting a business in a digital era brings entrepreneurs unprecedented advantages with technology and tools designed to optimize a business' operation. Whether it is a B2C or B2B, business owners can gather almost any data and metrics to improve their performance.

Being able to interpret data and making data-driven decisions becomes the key to the success of a business. It is not just a privilege for big companies anymore. Small businesses need it more than ever to make sustainable growth in the digital era.

The challenge? There are countless analytic tools and resources available that can generate data, but you need people who can extract insights from the massive amount of data.

Hire a data science team vs. outsourcing

Many companies go to campus recruitment and scout bright data science talent who also identify with their business value. Hiring people with data science and analytic skills is optimal, but for startups that are not ready to hire an in-house team or have a short-term question, outsourcing is a better option.

Data science consulting

Many online resources can help you extract data, but you are probably wondering: where do I begin? Which tool should I use? Which exact metric should I track?

The Rice University's Data Science Consulting Clinic provides free, open to the public assistance to help clients with all of those questions. It can be for various business sectors, such as research and product development, cost predictions, analytic tools, acquisition decisions, and talent management.

Here are some of the data science aspects we specialize in:

Research & Development - Obtain data to inform a decision on what products to develop.
Data analysis of who your customers are, what they are interested in, and what product to develop is crucial for B2C and B2B. A recent example of how Rice's Data Science Consulting Clinic is making a difference is a client needed assistance with market research to help inform a startup on what kind of product they should create next. The client was able to use the data resources suggested by the student and faculty consultants to gauge consumer sentiment and examples of successful products. With the data collected, the client was able to identify the features that drive customers to purchase similar products.

Cost Predictions - A case study for an energy company
Businesses need to make crucial decisions to achieve business intelligence. CEOs and managers need to base their decisions on predictions and analysis. Another client from the Data Science Consulting Clinic was interested in predicting cost and analysis of the factors contributing to the most expense for the coming year. The client's main problem was to transform the data into a statistical model that could predict the cost. With the prediction model suggested by the student consultants, the client was able to reduce the cost by controlling factors that were likely to cause higher costs.

Acquisition Decision Making for Business Professionals
Clients from the Rice MBA program were interested in investigating the causes and effects of private equity (PE) acquisition. Specifically, the clients wanted to analyze the difference in practice habits before and after acquisitions. As a result of the consultation, the clients were able to determine what factors influenced the PE's decision to acquire new equity.

Longer term projects

It would be helpful to have a dedicated data science team who can work over a semester or year long to find the solution.

Higher education has placed a prominent focus on data science programs, especially capstone projects that provide students with real-world experience. As a business owner, you might not even think about working with an esteemed university to help you with data challenges.

The Center for Transforming Data to Knowledge, informally known as the D2K Lab at Rice University, is founded based on the mission to seek real-world data challenges for passionate data science students. Student teams have worked on over 50 sponsored data science projects with partners from a wide variety of businesses, organizations, and community partners.

Advance data science and security

The perk of working with Rice University is that it provides the most advanced data science research tools and an interdisciplinary pool of student and faculty talent who are passionate about data science. Working with Rice University also guarantees a strong data security system and a comprehensive confidentiality agreement.

  • A cloud-based financial company sponsored a series of capstone projects on applying deep learning to reduce documentation errors and increase efficiency for businesses.
  • A fintech company sponsored multiple capstone projects on building statistical models to predict costs.
  • In the tech-med industry, the D2K Lab has partnered with the Medical Informational Corps, and researchers from Texas Children's Hospital and Baylor College of Medicine to build algorithms to predict cardiac events.

The future of data-driven decision making

The digital era has become the norm for all businesses (large or small), and there's no way to avoid the power of transforming data into actionable insights. So start gathering data even before you build out a business and incorporate the culture of data-driven decision making into every sector of your business.

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Shanna Jin is the communications and marketing specialist of the Data to Knowledge Lab at Rice University.

The Rice D2K Lab wants to help startups and small businesses solve business concerns with data science. Photo courtesy of Rice University

Rice University's data-focused lab presents unique opportunity for startups and small businesses

data to knowlege

A data-focused lab at Rice University is training the next generation of data scientists. However, the students at the Rice D2K Lab are doing more than just learning about the significance of data, machine learning, and artificial intelligence — they're working as data scientists now.

Businesses — large and small — can come into the lab and have Rice students and faculty work on data projects in both short-term and long-term capacity. One semester, a group of students worked with 311 call data for the city of Houston so that officials can figure out what parts of town were in the most need of support, says Jennifer Sanders, program administrator at the Rice D2K lab.

"They were able to show on a Houston map the areas where most of these 311 calls were coming from," Sanders tells InnovationMap. "That allowed the city to focus on those areas."

Lately, the lab has been focused on a several COVID-19 Houston Response Projects, which addressed issues ranging from homelessness in the time of a pandemic, ventilator distribution, and more. One team even made a recommendation to the city after a data project determined that adding five ambulances to southwest neighborhoods served by the Houston Fire Department Emergency Medical Services program would optimize response times.

The lab has two avenues to help businesses: a semester-long capstone course and a clinic for one-time sessions. This upcoming semester, the capstone course has 60 students signed up to work on 10 to 12 projects from corporate sponsors. These lab members — which support the program monetarily — are selected based on their fit within the program.

The D2K Consulting Clinic also offers free one-hour sessions on campus. At the clinic, students look at the data and assess the possibilities and advise on how to use that data for business gain or growth.

"The consulting clinic can be a starting point if a business is not sure what to do with their data," says Shanna Jin, communications and marketing specialist at the D2K Lab.

The clinic also presents a special opportunity for small businesses and startups, a niche Sanders says they haven't tapped into enough yet. She says most of the companies they've worked with are larger organizations, usually in the energy industry.

"We really want to broaden the scope to smaller startups, tech companies, and nonprofits," Sanders says. "We really don't have to limit ourselves. I would really love to expand our reach."

Membership dues for companies, which provides a more structured, long-term access to data consulting, range from $25,000 to $75,000 a year. However, Sanders says the lab is willing to work with startups on a cost that's more accessible.

Ultimately, the goal of the program is to connect the dots for businesses that have data and don't know how to use it.

"To realize the potential of big data, we need people — people who can transform data to knowledge," says the lab's founder, Genevera Allen, in a promotional video. "That's what we're doing with the Rice D2K Lab."

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UH lands $4M NIH grant to study early signs of autoimmune disease

NIH funding

The University of Houston recently received a $4 million National Institutes of Health grant to support a 10-year longitudinal study to identify the earliest biological markers of autoimmune disease.

Led by Chandra Mohan, the Hugh Roy and Lillie Cranz Cullen Endowed Professor of Biomedical Engineering, the study aims to examine what causes Systemic Autoimmune Rheumatic Diseases (SARDs) and to identify targets for future treatments. The study will be carried out in collaboration with Dr. Karen Costenbader at Harvard Medical School, Boston.

SARDs include conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, Sjögren’s syndrome and systemic sclerosis—all are considered chronic diseases currently without a cure. Autoimmune diseases affect over 30 million people globally, according to UH.

SARDs occur when the body’s immune system attacks healthy, non-threatening tissues and organs. According to UH, in these diseases, the body often attacks nuclear antigens, creating anti-nuclear autoantibodies, which can be early detection signs for SARDs in more than 50 percent of patients, Mohan says.

Researchers will study blood samples and environmental exposure over the 10 years to better understand anti-nuclear autoantibodies.

“Collectively, these studies will help identify the genetic, environmental and cellular factors that are operative at the two steps of SARD development, namely the emergence of anti-nuclear autoantibodies and disease onset,” Mohan said in a news release. “ More importantly, these studies will highlight functional molecular pathways and mechanisms that may be operative at each step."

Mohan predicts that looking at SARDs’ shared characteristics, rather than each disease individually, could help identify more treatment methods.

“Individual SARDs have been examined in silos without an attempt to discern shared underlying features at the molecular level,” he added in the release. “Current understanding of the initial (and likely shared) origins of SARDs is only rudimentary but urgently needed to develop means for prevention and treatment.”

Earlier this year, UH also received an $11 million NIH grant to conduct a first-of-its-kind study of early language development in children ages 18 to 24 months. Read more here.

New Texas Stock Exchange officially begins trading in Dallas

Welcome to Y'all Street

Two-step aside, New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq. The Dallas-based Texas Stock Exchange, nicknamed Y’all Street, just kicked off live trading with five stocks — and lots of Lone Star ambition.

“The Texas Stock Exchange aims to revitalize competition for [stock] issuers, establish the premier venue for listings, and create a world-class trading platform for all market participants,” the exchange says in a fact sheet.

The exchange — whose Texas-influenced nickname is a nod to New York City’s Wall Street — has collected at least $275 million in investments. The roughly 90 financial backers of TXSE include Bank of America, BlackRock, Charles Schwab, Citadel Securities, Dell Family Office, Fortress, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan Chase.

Representatives of TXSE couldn’t be reached for comment. On its website, the exchange calls itself “the most well-capitalized equities exchange to ever be approved” by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

Not to be outdone, NYSE has launched Dallas-based NYSE Texas and Nasdaq has expanded its presence in Dallas.

Y’all Street adds to Dallas-Fort Worth’s rising status as a major hub for financial services, with The Wall Street Journal naming North Texas the country’s second biggest financial hub after New York City.

“A homegrown national exchange means more jobs, more investment, and more growth opportunities for businesses and communities across the Lone Star State,” Gabriela von zur Muehlen, senior vice president and chief policy officer at the Texas Association of Business, told The Texas Tribune.

Bulent Temel, an associate professor of practice in economics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, told Texas Standard that TXSE “is going to boost the credibility of the Texas economy.”

Texas’ estimated gross domestic product (GDP), a yardstick for the size of an economy, climbed to a record-setting $2.9 trillion in 2025, making it the state with the second highest GDP after California. DFW’s estimated GDP in 2023 stood at $744.6 billion, eclipsing the GDP of many countries.

“The center of gravity for American capitalism is now headquartered in the Boom Belt,” Abbott proclaimed in April, referring to an 11-state region (including Texas) in the South and Southeast that’s seeing tremendous economic and population growth. “The Texas Stock Exchange is the natural extension of that capitalism. It ensures that capital markets will reflect the quadrant that is driving American growth.”

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Orion vehicle manager reflects on Artemis II, looks to 2028 moon mission

Q&A

Humanity is finally headed back to the moon after more than half a century. This year's launch of the Artemis II mission in the Orion spacecraft put four crew members in lunar orbit and tested the new ship developed by Lockheed Martin.

Everything went smoothly, safely returning astronauts home, but there is always room to improve. InnovationMap chatted via email with Orion vehicle manager Branelle Rodriguez, shortly after a talk at The Ion, for insight on how Orion might perform in the future as the next lunar landing approaches in early 2028.

InnovationMap: How satisfied are you with the way Orion operated on this past mission?

Branelle Rodriguez: Orion performed exceptionally well during Artemis II, successfully demonstrating critical spacecraft capabilities, including life support systems, displays and controls, and executing manual piloting operations. Artemis II brought humans back to the moon, achieving key exploration and scientific imagery, while validating systems essential for future Artemis missions.

IM: What is the most important thing you learned about improving Orion for the next mission?

BR: The Artemis II mission provided invaluable insights into crew operations and spacecraft performance in a deep-space environment. With every mission, NASA applies lessons learned to continuously improve Orion’s operations, validate design and ensure mission readiness. Artemis II offered our first opportunity to evaluate several new systems and gain a deeper understanding of what it is like for astronauts to live and work inside the spacecraft. The operational, technical and human factors data collected are being integrated across the program to refine future missions, reduce risk and enhance overall mission success.

IM: How has Orion helped the mission to explore space?

BR: Orion is one of NASA’s foundational elements for human deep space exploration—not only supporting the mission but serving as a core component of it. It is currently the only spacecraft capable of carrying crew on deep space missions and returning them safely to Earth from the high speeds required from the vicinity of the moon. No other spacecraft has the technology to endure the extremes that come with human deep-space travel, such as advanced environmental and life support, navigation, communications, radiation shielding, and the world’s largest ablative heat shield to protect the astronauts during reentry into Earth’s atmosphere. Orion has already taken astronauts to explore space farther than ever before—252,756 miles from Earth— and will carry crews to the moon on future missions to explore the lunar South Pole region. The astronauts’ observations, samples, and data collected on these future missions will expand our understanding of our solar system and home planet.

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This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

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