New TMCx program launches, C-level execs named at Houston startups, and more innovation news

Short stories

The new programming geared at idea-stage startups has officially commenced at TMC Innovation Institute. Courtesy of TMCx

There's been a lot of recent Houston innovation news, and you might have missed something. Keep up to date with all the news happening among startups and technology in Houston in this innovation news roundup.

If you know of innovation-focused news happening, email me at natalie@innovationmap.com with the details and subscribe to our daily newsletter that sends fresh stories straight to your inboxes every morning.

TMCalpha premieres

Courtesy of TMC

The Texas Medical Center has long counseled budding medical entrepreneurs in various capacities through its TMC Innovation Institute, but wanted to introduce programming specifically for early-stage companies. That's how TMC alpha was born and announced at the most recent TMCx Demo Day.

The program officially launched on July 18 and will host meetups on the third Thursday of every month.

"Over the past five years, TMC Innovation has blossomed into a global proving ground for healthcare startup companies from across the world, and we could not be more pleased with the myriad ways in which the ecosystem here has expanded in nature," says TMC Innovation Director Tom Luby in a release. "That being said, we realized that TMC Innovation needed to do more for the local innovation community and offer ample resources to support homegrown talent from within the confines of the largest medical city in the world. With TMC alpha, the hope is to connect anyone with a fledgling healthcare idea to the TMC Innovation network and create a two-way channel of meaningful dialogue."

Innowatts scores extra funding and names new C-level exec

Photo via innowatts.com

Houston-based AI-enabled analytics company, Innowatts, is growing in more ways than one. The company, which is fresh off an over $18.2 million Series B fundraise, added move funds and a new C-level executive.

Veronorte, a South American venture capital firm backed by one of the largest utilities in Colombia, became an additional investor in the company with an undisclosed contribution. Meanwhile, Eric Danziger joined the company as its new chief revenue officer. He will be tasked with the growth and sales of Innowatts' eUtility™ product.

"As the utility grid becomes more complex with the proliferation of electric vehicles and distributed generation," says Danziger in a release, "utility companies have to adapt to the data generated and needs of their consumers to manage these complex requirements."

Startup snags free office space prize

Photo courtesy of The Cannon

Shoot, a digital marketplace that simplifies the photographer and videographer booking process, has scored free office space in the newly opened Cannon building after receiving the second annual Insperity Innovation Scholarship.

The company was co-founded by Simbai Mutandiro and Alina Merida and has already launched its beta platform. The company will release its next version of the platform soon.

"Our relationship with The Cannon and the Insperity Innovation Scholarship are part of our initiative to help startups become successful more quickly by connecting and collaborating with like-minded individuals," says Larry Shaffer, Insperity senior vice president of marketing and business development, in a release. "We congratulate Shoot on receiving this scholarship and wish the co- founders continued success in furthering their entrepreneurial dream."

The other three finalists in the contest — Delfin, Social Chains, and SOTAOG — will receive open desk memberships at The Cannon for six months.

Houston falls low on the list of cities booming with growing private companies

Getty Images

When it comes to the major metros with the biggest jump in private businesses with over $1 million in revenue, Houston is the last on the list for Texas cities. LendingTree looked at the data, and, between 2014 and 2016, Houston only saw an increase of 4.9 percent in million-dollar business growth. This earned the Bayou City a No. 32 ranking across the country.

Dallas was slightly ahead of Houston with 5.2 percent growth and a No. 29 rank. Meanwhile, Austin earned the top spot with 15.1 percent growth. San Antonio, the only other Texas metro in the study, ranked No. 12 with 9 percent growth.

Nesh forms partnership

Photo courtesy of Thomas Miller/Breitling Energy

The Woodlands-based WellDatabase has announced a partnership with Nesh, an AI-optimized tool that's like the Siri or Alexa of oil and gas.

"The technology is amazing and we are thrilled to work with the Nesh team," writes John Ferrell, CEO of WellDatabase, in a blog post. "The integration allows Nesh to run real-time queries against WellDatabase. Users can ask a multitude of questions and get instant answers. They can also work with the Nesh team directly to train and build new questions and workflows."

Rice University and Cognite join forces

Courtesy of Cognite

When Oslo, Norway-based Cognite announced its dual U.S. headquarters in Houston and Austin, it had plans to engage universities from the get go. Now, the company, which specializes in data software with industrial applications, has officially created a partnership and internship program with Rice University.

"This partnership illustrates Cognite's commitment to attracting top people to build the most talented software engineering team in the world," says John Markus Lervik, Cognite co-founder and CEO, in a release. "Cognite solves some of the most complex problems related to industrial digitalization. To do that, we need the best minds, so partnering with Rice University was a natural choice."

Rice students are currently in Norway this summer working for Cognite as a part as the inaugural program.

The Cannon teams up with Thompson & Knight

Courtesy of The Cannon

Houston-based law firm Thompson & Knight has officially signed on to provide resources for The Cannon startups in a strategic partnership between the two companies.

"Thompson & Knight is pleased to partner with Houston-based entrepreneurs who are building the innovation, services, and technological platforms of the very near future," says Mark M. Sloan, managing partner of Thompson & Knight, in a news release. "We will offer our experience in the issues common to startup businesses, including intellectual property, technology, corporate, labor, and other areas of counsel that will help further the goals of these pioneering companies."

The law firm will have an office in The Cannon's recently opened building in West Houston.

Solugen names president

Getty Images

In May, Houston-based chemicals company, Solugen Inc., closed a $32 million round. Now, the company has put a portion of that money to work to hired the newest executive on the team. Jason Roberts, who has a decade of chemicals and oil and gas experience, has joined Solugen as president.

"What I found most compelling about Solugen was the company's quick successes and their overarching goal of decarbonizing the chemicals industry," says Roberts in a release. "The company's fundamental chemistry and technologies have created products that no one in the industry currently has. I am excited to join this young company's fast moving team at such a significant time in its history and look forward to helping scale their innovative products and services."

Ad Placement 300x100

Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Planned UT Austin med center, anchored by MD Anderson, gets $100M gift

med funding

The University of Texas at Austin’s planned multibillion-dollar medical center, which will include a hospital run by Houston’s University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center, just received a $100 million boost from a billionaire husband-and-wife duo.

Tench Coxe, a former venture capitalist who’s a major shareholder in chipmaking giant Nvidia, and Simone Coxe, co-founder and former CEO of the Blanc & Otus PR firm, contributed the $100 million—one of the largest gifts in UT history. The Coxes live in Austin.

“Great medical care changes lives,” says Simone Coxe, “and we want more people to have access to it.”

The University of Texas System announced the medical center project in 2023 and cited an estimated price tag of $2.5 billion. UT initially said the medical center would be built on the site of the Frank Erwin Center, a sports and entertainment venue on the UT Austin campus that was demolished in 2024. The 20-acre site, north of downtown and the state Capitol, is near Dell Seton Medical Center, UT Dell Medical School and UT Health Austin.

Now, UT officials are considering a bigger, still-unidentified site near the Domain mixed-use district in North Austin, although they haven’t ruled out the Erwin Center site. The Domain development is near St. David’s North Medical Center.

As originally planned, the medical center would house a cancer center built and operated by MD Anderson and a specialty hospital built and operated by UT Austin. Construction on the two hospitals is scheduled to start this year and be completed in 2030. According to a 2025 bid notice for contractors, each hospital is expected to encompass about 1.5 million square feet, meaning the medical center would span about 3 million square feet.

Features of the MD Anderson hospital will include:

Inpatient care
Outpatient clinics
Surgery suites
Radiation, chemotherapy, cell, and proton treatments
Diagnostic imaging
Clinical drug trials

UT says the new medical center will fuse the university’s academic and research capabilities with the medical and research capabilities of MD Anderson and Dell Medical School.

UT officials say priorities for spending the Coxes’ gift include:

Recruiting world-class medical professionals and scientists
Supporting construction
Investing in technology
Expanding community programs that promote healthy living and access to care

Tench says the opportunity to contribute to building an institution from the ground up helped prompt the donation. He and others say that thanks to MD Anderson’s participation, the medical center will bring world-renowned cancer care to the Austin area.

“We have a close friend who had to travel to Houston for care she should have been able to get here at home. … Supporting the vision for the UT medical center is exactly the opportunity Austin needed,” he says.

The rate of patients who leave the Austin area to seek care for serious medical issues runs as high as 25 percent, according to UT.

New Rice Brain Institute partners with TMC to award inaugural grants

brain trust

The recently founded Rice Brain Institute has named the first four projects to receive research awards through the Rice and TMC Neuro Collaboration Seed Grant Program.

The new grant program brings together Rice faculty with clinicians and scientists at The University of Texas Medical Branch, Baylor College of Medicine, UTHealth Houston and The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The program will support pilot projects that address neurological disease, mental health and brain injury.

The first round of awards was selected from a competitive pool of 40 proposals, and will support projects that reflect Rice Brain Institute’s research agenda.

“These awards are meant to help teams test bold ideas and build the collaborations needed to sustain long-term research programs in brain health,” Behnaam Aazhang, Rice Brain Institute director and co-director of the Rice Neuroengineering Initiative, said in a news release.

The seed funding has been awarded to the following principal investigators:

Kevin McHugh, associate professor of bioengineering and chemistry at Rice, and Peter Kan, professor and chair of neurosurgery at the UTMB. McHugh and Kan are developing an injectable material designed to seal off fragile, abnormal blood vessels that can cause life-threatening bleeding in the brain.
Jerzy Szablowski, assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice, and Jochen Meyer, assistant professor of neurology at Baylor. Szablowski and Meyer are leading a nonsurgical, ultrasound approach to deliver gene-based therapies to deep brain regions involved in seizures to control epilepsy without implanted electrodes or invasive procedures.
Juliane Sempionatto, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice, and Aaron Gusdon, associate professor of neurosurgery at UTHealth Houston. Sempionatto and Gusdon are leading efforts to create a blood test that can identify patients at high risk for delayed brain injury following aneurysm-related hemorrhage, which could lead to earlier intervention and improved outcomes.
Christina Tringides, assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice, and Sujit Prabhu, professor of neurosurgery at MD Anderson, who are working to reduce the risk of long-term speech and language impairment during brain tumor removal by combining advanced brain recordings, imaging and noninvasive stimulation.

The grants were facilitated by Rice’s Educational and Research Initiatives for Collaborative Health (ENRICH) Office. Rice says that the unique split-funding model of these grants could help structure future collaborations between the university and the TMC.

The Rice Brain Institute launched this fall and aims to use engineering, natural sciences and social sciences to research the brain and reduce the burden of neurodegenerative, neurodevelopmental and mental health disorders. Last month, the university's Shepherd School of Music also launched the Music, Mind and Body Lab, an interdisciplinary hub that brings artists and scientists together to study the "intersection of the arts, neuroscience and the medical humanities." Read more here.

Your data center is either closer than you think or much farther away

houston voices

A new study shows why some facilities cluster in cities for speed and access, while others move to rural regions in search of scale and lower costs. Based on research by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard).

Key findings:

Third-party colocation centers are physical facilities in close proximity to firms that use them, while cloud providers operate large data centers from a distance and sell access to virtualized computing resources as on‑demand services over the internet.
Hospitals and financial firms often require urban third-party centers for low latency and regulatory compliance, while batch processing and many AI workloads can operate more efficiently from lower-cost cloud hubs.
For policymakers trying to attract data centers, access to reliable power, water and high-capacity internet matter more than tax incentives.

Recent outages and the surge in AI-driven computing have made data center siting decisions more consequential than ever, especially as energy and water constraints tighten. Communities invest public dollars on the promise of jobs and growth, while firms weigh long-term commitments to land, power and connectivity.

Against that backdrop, a critical question comes into focus: Where do data centers get built — and what actually drives those decisions?

A new study by Tommy Pan Fang (Rice Business) and Shane Greenstein (Harvard Business School) provides the first large-scale statistical analysis of data center location strategies across the United States. It offers policymakers and firms a clearer starting point for understanding how different types of data centers respond to economic and strategic incentives.

Forthcoming in the journal Strategy Science, the study examines two major types of infrastructure: third-party colocation centers that lease server space to multiple firms, and hyperscale cloud centers owned by providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Two Models, Two Location Strategies

The study draws on pre-pandemic data from 2018 and 2019, a period of relative geographic stability in supply and demand. This window gives researchers a clean baseline before remote work, AI demand and new infrastructure pressures began reshaping internet traffic patterns.

The findings show that data centers follow a bifurcated geography. Third-party centers cluster in dense urban markets, where buyers prioritize proximity to customers despite higher land and operating costs. Cloud providers, by contrast, concentrate massive sites in a small number of lower-density regions, where electricity, land and construction are cheaper and economies of scale are easier to achieve.

Third-party data centers, in other words, follow demand. They locate in urban markets where firms in finance, healthcare and IT value low latency, secure storage, and compliance with regulatory standards.

Using county-level data, the researchers modeled how population density, industry mix and operating costs predict where new centers enter. Every U.S. metro with more than 700,000 residents had at least one third-party provider, while many mid-sized cities had none.

ImageThis pattern challenges common assumptions. Third-party facilities are more distributed across urban America than prevailing narratives suggest.

Customer proximity matters because some sectors cannot absorb delay. In critical operations, even slight pauses can have real consequences. For hospital systems, lag can affect performance and risk exposure. And in high-frequency trading, milliseconds can determine whether value is captured or lost in a transaction.

“For industries where speed is everything, being too far from the physical infrastructure can meaningfully affect performance and risk,” Pan Fang says. “Proximity isn’t optional for sectors that can’t absorb delay.”

The Economics of Distance

For cloud providers, the picture looks very different. Their decisions follow a logic shaped primarily by cost and scale. Because cloud services can be delivered from afar, firms tend to build enormous sites in low-density regions where power is cheap and land is abundant.

These facilities can draw hundreds of megawatts of electricity and operate with far fewer employees than urban centers. “The cloud can serve almost anywhere,” Pan Fang says, “so location is a question of cost before geography.”

The study finds that cloud infrastructure clusters around network backbones and energy economics, not talent pools. Well-known hubs like Ashburn, Virginia — often called “Data Center Alley” — reflect this logic, having benefited from early network infrastructure that made them natural convergence points for digital traffic.

Local governments often try to lure data centers with tax incentives, betting they will create high-tech jobs. But the study suggests other factors matter more to cloud providers, including construction costs, network connectivity and access to reliable, affordable electricity.

When cloud centers need a local presence, distance can sometimes become a constraint. Providers often address this by working alongside third-party operators. “Third-party centers can complement cloud firms when they need a foothold closer to customers,” Pan Fang says.

That hybrid pattern — massive regional hubs complementing strategic colocation — may define the next phase of data center growth.

Looking ahead, shifts in remote work, climate resilience, energy prices and AI-driven computing may reshape where new facilities go. Some workloads may move closer to users, while others may consolidate into large rural hubs. Emerging data-sovereignty rules could also redirect investment beyond the United States.

“The cloud feels weightless,” Pan Fang says, “but it rests on real choices about land, power and proximity.”

---

This article originally appeared on Rice Business Wisdom. Written by Scott Pett.

Pan Fang and Greenstein (2025). “Where the Cloud Rests: The Economic Geography of Data Centers,” forthcoming in Strategy Science.

View All Listings

INNOVATIONMAP EMAILS ARE AWESOME