All bets are on: Houston innovator expands sports betting platform for enhanced fan engagement

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 250

Kelly Pracht joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to discuss how she's expanded nVenue to new sports. Photo courtesy of nVenue

All though career technologist Kelly Pracht began her entrepreneurial journey with her favorite sport, baseball, she's recently expanded the data-backed, fan-engaging sports betting platform to new sports.

Pract, who spent nearly 20 years designing technologies at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, founded nVenue in 2019 after realizing that, while there's endless data and stats available in baseball, there's nothing that exists for fans to engage in that data in real time. So, she set out to build it herself.

At first, the platform launched as a direct-to-fans platform, but Pracht says on the Houston Innovators Podcast that the company pivoted to B-to-B amid its participation in the Comcast SportsTech accelerator.

"The industry was super hungry for fan engagement and sports betting, and we were one of the only companies that could do it," she says on the show. "We found this huge product-market fit of the whole industry wanting ways to engage and bet in real time."

nVenue's growth over the years, which included a partnership with Apple TV for onscreen analytics during Friday night baseball broadcasts and a $3.5 million seed funding raise last year, has been steady, and now the platform has expanded into new sports.

"Our vision was never just baseball," Pracht, who developed her technology by attending games at Minute Maid Park, says. "What a wonderful run the Astros have had since back in 2015. It was the perfect place to develop, but our vision was always that this technology — in order to do what I wanted it to do — needed to be open to all sports. As sports fans, we watch a lot of sports."

Through partnerships with the NBA and NASCAR, nVenue has officially expanded to basketball and motor sports — two sports with their own data volume and challenges. Pracht says it's important to her, with each new sport nVenue enters into, that she takes the time to learn and engage with each sport — something partnering with the professional leagues has helped with. Ultimately, Pracht explains, she's engaging with fans just like her platform does.

"The process is the same, and that's my unique speciality in life — taking something that's very complicated and breaking it down into a way that's more simple and usable," she says. "When it comes to predicting live sports — whether it's NASCAR, golf, or cricket — it comes down to watching the fan and understand what their doing."

Fertitta just had an exit of one of his companies. Photo by J. Thomas Ford

Tilman Fertitta's golden online gaming casino officially sold to major sports company

done deal

The acquisition of Tilman Feritta’s Golden Nugget Online Gaming, Inc. (Nasdaq: GNOG) by digital sports entertainment and gaming company DraftKings Inc. (Nasdaq: DKNG) is complete.

DraftKings announced that it has completed the acquisition, worth at approximately $1.6 billion (dubbed the “GNOG Acquisition”) on Thursday, May 5.

“This will be an alliance unlike any other in the digital sports, entertainment and online gaming industry,” Fertitta said in a statement . “Now that the acquisition is completed, I look forward to what the future will bring for our combined company and am confident this relationship will be a huge success.”

DraftKings notes in a press release that this GNOG Acquisition will allow the company to leverage Golden Nugget’s established brand to “broaden its reach into new customer segments and enhance the combined company’s iGaming product offerings through DraftKings’ vertically integrated tech stack and Golden Nugget Online Gaming’s unique capabilities – including Live Dealer.”

Notably, the GNOG Acquisition will not include brick and mortar Golden Nugget casinos; Fertitta will maintain ownership of those entities.

The GNOG Acquisition will deliver “significant” benefits to DraftKings, as well as expected savings of $300 million, a release notes. The company aims to deploy a multi-brand approach meant to enhance cross-selling opportunities and drive increased revenue.

Additionally, DraftKings and Fertitta Entertainment expect to rebrand some current and future retail sportsbook locations at Fertitta Entertainment-owned Golden Nugget properties into DraftKings sportsbooks.

As CultureMap previously reported, DraftKings' agreement with Fertitta Entertainment will provide for it to become the exclusive daily fantasy sports, sports betting, and iGaming partner of the Houston Rockets. Additionally, if sports betting becomes legal in Texas, DraftKings will open a sportsbook at the Toyota Center.

As the Houston Chronicle reports, DraftKings, headquartered in Boston, more than doubled its revenues to nearly $1.3 billion in 2021 from about $615 million in 2020, according to SEC filings. Its net loss widened to about $1.5 billion from $1.2 billion in 2020.

“Acquiring Golden Nugget Online Gaming gives us synergies across our business,” said Jason Robins, chairman and CEO of DraftKings, in a statement. “We anticipate that this acquisition will provide meaningful revenue uplift by utilizing our data-driven marketing capabilities and a dual brand iGaming strategy, gross margin improvement opportunities, and cost savings across external marketing and SG&A. I am proud to welcome the Golden Nugget Online Gaming team to the DraftKings family.”

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

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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

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

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