Houston fintech startup selected for award-winning program

big start

This Houston-based couple used their own experience of paying down consumer debt to launch a new company. Image courtesy of SpenDebt

Kiley and Ty'Lisha Summers once found themselves nearly $100,000 in debt; now, they have a goal of owning a $100 million company. The Houston-based couple used their own experience of paying down consumer debt to launch SpenDebt, a SaaS payment solution chosen for the Mastercard Start Path program.

You could say debt is ubiquitous in the United States. A 2015 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts found that 80 percent of American households have some form of debt. "As we started sharing our story, we realized that there were so many people who were just like us but didn't know what to do," explains Ty'Lisha, co-founder of SpenDebt.

SpenDebt's model relies on the simple truth: everyone spends money. The company, which is available as a phone app or web service, securely links to the user's bank account and allows you to designate a predetermined micropayment to be deducted at every transaction. The micropayments are then applied monthly to the debt of the user's choice, whether it be lofty student loans or a monthly car payment.

"God gave my husband the vision to start SpenDebt to help people help themselves," she says. Kiley even decided to share his concept Mastercard, but the idea was too early to gain anything other than the corporation's intrigue.

After two years of development and a subsequent year of beta testing, SpenDebt launched its commercialized product in 2019. The Summers applied to Mastercard Start Path, a highly competitive startup engagement program multiple times before being accepted into its 2021 cohort of six scaling startups.

"To finally get the 'yes,' it just made it full circle," says Ty'Lisha. "It's a game changer for SpenDebt."

Ty'Lisha Summers is the co-founder of SpenDebt. Photo courtesy

Fintech is a multibillion-dollar industry, and financial apps have become the darlings of venture capitalism. According to a SpenDebt release, companies that have participated in Start Path have gone on to raise more than $3 billion in post-program capital. Even while investor budgets were trimmed during the pandemic, Fintech companies garnered $44 billion in investments — a 14 percent increase since 2019, reports Finextra.

From the New Statesman to the Raconteur, media outlets and pundits have explored the saturation of the fintech sector. Ty'Lisha is confident that SpenDebt is different from its competitors.

"What's unique is that we give our customers 100 percent control on defining what that micropayment is, unlike our competition where it is strictly just round-up," she explains. The average SpenDebt user has set a $1.70 micropayment, but the co-founders have seen payments set at anything from 50 cents to $25 per transaction.

Initiatives like Bank of America's Keep the Change rounds up each transaction to the nearest dollar amount, then puts that money into a savings account for you to pay your debt off — or not. McKinsey & Company survey reports that more than 50 percent of US consumers expect to spend extra as COVID-19 restrictions relax, with higher-income millennials intending to spend the most. According to CNBC, Gen Z shoppers are also predicted to spend big on niceties like clothing and travel.

Though no app can automate personal discipline, SpenDebt can help you pay down debt and build financial literacy.

"With SpenDebt, once you tell us where you want that payment to go, that's where it's going," explains Ty'Lisha. When the micropayments are deducted from your account, SpenDebt holds onto your accrued payments and sends them monthly to the creditor of your choice. Ty'Lisha notes the service can be canceled or put on hold.

NBC News reported that 46 percent of Americans wiped out their emergency funds in 2020 as they shuffled to make ends meet. States around the country, including Texas, even enacted moratoriums on utility shut-offs in response to the pandemic. In some industries, "businesses went from collecting full payments from people to not collecting anything" or accepting partial payments, she explains.

The pandemic highlighted an opportunity for SpenDebt to partner with enterprises to offer creative solutions for payments that help customers pay off existing debt while helping businesses collect "something versus nothing."

As SpenDebt includes enterprises in its long-term growth strategy, the company founders have also pledged to work with nonprofits.

For the Summerses, SpenDebt's mission surpasses their desire to live a debt-free life. "As a part of our debt-free journey, we couldn't help but become more well-versed in finances. We were on a quest to make our money work for us versus the other way around," shares Ty'Lisha.

As Black business owners, Kiley and Ty'Lisha want to focus on building generational wealth for their family's future and help SpenDebt users do the same. "We like to say that we want all of the generational curses that may have been passed down to us to stop with us, and to start creating generational wealth for our future," she explains.

"[Debt] doesn't just address the middle class; there are so many people across the spectrum in debt," says Ty'Lisha. "A lot of times, the low-to-moderate income communities get overlooked," she continues.

SpenDebt is a preferred partner of United Way of Greater Houston and recently penned a partnership with Impact Hub Houston — an incubator with a mission to empower entrepreneurs and small businesses to take on issues like sustainability, gender equality, and economic growth.

SpenDebt hopes to capture its first enterprise customer during its six-month StartPath program and hopes to one day become a $100 billion company. "The resources, the network, the knowledge that we're getting from Mastercard and their network, the exposure that we're getting—it's going to be huge," says Ty'Lisha.

Of the many goals for SpenDebt's future, she wants the company to be "a solution for communities that may have been overlooked."

Ad Placement 300x100
Ad Placement 300x600

CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Property Showcase

Rice student startup lands $1.85M to launch medical drone network

critical cargo

Students at Rice University have developed a medical cargo drone transport system to help deliver sensitive medical supplies and improve mobile healthcare efforts.

Haast Autonomous is the brainchild of graduating seniors Ege Halac, Jason Chen and Santiago Brent, who got their venture idea off the ground with help from the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (Lilie) Summer Venture Studio. The founders have developed the prototype at Rice’s Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen (OEDK) with fellow Rice researchers Felix Hasson, Ethan Javedan, Kenna Sanders and Caden Schmidt.

The startup has raised $1.85 million in pre-seed funding, according to Rice. The founders plan to focus on Haast full-time following graduation. They said they aim to launch pilot trials in 2027 and head to market later that year.

“We need better alternatives for a fast, safe and on-demand system of transport for life-critical cargo,” Halac said in a news release from Rice.

The Haast team has developed a custom aircraft with software that manages dispatch, routes, and chain of custody to assist in how materials move between sites in centralized medical systems. Generally, the transportation of medical supplies and materials between facilities and points of care relies on ground shipping or expensive air transport.

Haast Autonomous’ aircraft can take off and land vertically, and is designed around a mission profile of 50 to 62 miles. It can carry a payload of at least 5 pounds, with future versions intended to scale up in size. It also includes a built-in payload bay that regulates temperature, pressure, vibration and tilt to protect sensitive contents such as patient samples, antivenom or poisoning kits and radioligands or other therapies, according to Rice.

At first, the company envisioned the mission to be centered around transplants, but saw the product being best suited for a variety of operations.

“What we realized is that the platform we are building is suited for medicine, but it really underlies a much larger problem of mission-critical transport across industries,” Brent added in the news release. “We are building the fastest, most secure logistics chain for the world’s most sensitive cargo.”

Haast Autonomous was recognized at the 2026 Oshman Engineering Design Showcase and Competition, where it won Best Aerospace or Transportation Technology. It also performed well in the 2026 Napier Rice Launch Challenge.

In the future, Haast Autonomous plans to deploy a fleet of aircraft. The software will be designed to assist hospitals in requesting flights and tracking deliveries in real time.

“The drone is only part of the solution,” Chen also added in the release. “What matters is moving something from point A to point B in a way that fits into how hospitals already operate.”

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

---

This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

View All Listings