Houston software development firm Axon is planning its Texas expansion thanks to its recent acquisition. Photo courtesy of Axon

For Owen D. Goode, Houstonians have a propensity for never being satisfied — and that's been extremely advantageous for his business.

“There’s this feeling in Houston of not being finished yet that I love,” says Goode. “Nobody is every fully satisfied in the best possible way. Nobody is sitting back and saying, ‘This is the best we could have done.’”

Goode, formerly the CEO of Axon, comes from an aviation background that includes operating as both pilot and mechanic. He now uses those skillsets in a very different world—helping to lead a company that focuses on system transformation. Axon, which was founded in 2017 was a boutique software firm focused on cloud engineering and data engineering.

This January, a larger company, Zaelot, led by CEO Jeff Lombard, acquired Axon. Zaelot is a global, software firm with a presence in 14 countries, mostly focused in the United States, Uruguay, and Iceland.

“Together we have a strong suite of offerings across a wide variety of domains including full-stack development, cloud/data engineering, design, staff augmentation, project management, and software architecture. We also have experience in multiple domains, including health care, aviation, defense, finance, and startups,” says Goode.

To the layman, this sounds impressive—and complicated—but what does Zaelot, actually do? Asked to explain at a kindergarten level, Goode says, “We take old code and make it less bad.”

With the motto, “Solve Today, Build Tomorrow,” Goode has worked with companies such as a major international airline to clean up its back end. Using a real estate analogy, Goode says that he and his team transform brownfield development environments (“a half-finished building that’s messy and there’s sewage everywhere”) into greenfield ones. It’s essentially a fresh start for sites that have become muddled over years of neglect.

“Health care is notoriously bad for that,” Goode says, though he is unable to disclose specific past or present clients.

Thanks to the merger with Zaelot, Goode and his team are now poised for rapid growth. Becoming part of a 100-person multinational company has now unlocked capital that Axon had never seen before. Goode promises rapid expansion in Texas, beginning in Houston in the next six months to a year. The executive—now Zaelot’s executive vice president—is already a well-known face on the Houston scene, where he regularly attends Cup of Joey and other Houston community events, such as CodeLaunch.

That growth includes gaining office space and expanding his staff in Space City.

“Zaelot's claim to fame is an extreme focus on employee satisfaction, with a 94 percent retention rate,” he says.

It’s his goal to keep those numbers up by serving the people who work for and with the company and treating them as human beings with families, not interchangeable parts. Next on the horizon, Goode says he and his team will be hiring sales and technical account management positions.

Though Zaelot’s staff is distributed around the world, Goode says Houston will always be home base for him. “It’s a literal launchpad that we’re continuing to grow off of,” he says. “I’m a big believer in Texas in general. And I’m just excited to see what happens.”

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Rice University team develops eco-friendly method to destroy 'forever chemicals' in water

clean water research

Rice University researchers have teamed up with South Korean scientists to develop the first eco-friendly technology that captures and destroys toxic “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, in water.

PFAS have been linked to immune system disruption, certain cancers, liver damage and reproductive disorders. They can be found in water, soil and air, as well as in products like Teflon pans, waterproof clothing and food packaging. They do not degrade easily and are difficult to remove.

Thus far, PFAS cleanup methods have relied on adsorption, in which molecules cling to materials like activated carbon or ion-exchange resins. But these methods tend to have limited capacity, low efficiency, slow performance and can create additional waste.

The Rice-led study, published in the journal Advanced Materials, centered on a layered double hydroxide (LDH) material made from copper and aluminum that could rapidly capture PFAS and be used to destroy the chemicals.

The study was led by Rice professor Youngkun Chung, a postdoctoral fellow under the mentorship of Michael S. Wong. It was conducted in collaboration with Seoktae Kang, professor at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, and Keon-Ham Kim, professor at Pukyung National University, who first discovered the LDH material.

The team evaluated the LDH material in river water, tap water and wastewater. And, according to Rice, that material’s unique copper-aluminum layers and charge imbalances created an ideal binding environment to capture PFAS molecules.

“To my astonishment, this LDH compound captured PFAS more than 1,000 times better than other materials,” Chung, lead author of the study and now a fellow at Rice’s WaTER (Water Technologies, Entrepreneurship and Research) Institute and Sustainability Institute, said in a news release. “It also worked incredibly fast, removing large amounts of PFAS within minutes, about 100 times faster than commercial carbon filters.”

Next, Chung, along with Rice professors Pedro Alvarez and James Tour, worked to develop an eco-friendly, sustainable method of thermally decomposing the PFAS captured on the LDH material. They heated saturated material with calcium carbonate, which eliminated more than half of the trapped PFAS without releasing toxic by-products.

The team believes the study’s results could potentially have large-scale applications in industrial cleanups and municipal water treatments.

“We are excited by the potential of this one-of-a-kind LDH-based technology to transform how PFAS-contaminated water sources are treated in the near future,” Wong added in the news release. “It’s the result of an extraordinary international collaboration and the creativity of young researchers.”

Axiom Space announces new CEO amid strategic leadership change

new leader

Six months after promoting Tejpaul Bhatia from chief revenue officer to CEO, commercial space infrastructure and human spaceflight services provider Axiom Space has replaced him.

On Oct. 15, Houston-based Axiom announced Jonathan Cirtain has succeeded Bhatia as CEO. Bhatia joined Axiom in 2021. Cirtain remains the company’s president, a role he assumed in June, according to his LinkedIn profile.

In a news release, Axiom said Cirtain’s appointment as CEO is a “strategic leadership change” aimed at advancing the company’s development of space infrastructure.

Axiom hired Cirtain as president in June, according to his LinkedIn profile. The company didn’t publicly announce that move.

Kam Ghaffarian, co-founder and executive chairman of Axiom, said Cirtain’s “proven track record of leadership and commitment to excellence align perfectly with our mission of building era-defining space infrastructure that will drive exploration and fuel the global space economy.”

Aside from praising Cirtain, Ghaffarian expressed his “sincere gratitude” for Bhatia’s work at Axiom, including his leadership as CEO during “a significant transition period.”

Bhatia was promoted to CEO in April after helping Axiom gain more than $1 billion in contracts, Space News reported. He succeeded Ghaffarian as CEO. Axiom didn’t indicate whether Bhatia quit or was terminated.

Cirtain, an astrophysicist, was a senior executive at BWX Technologies, a supplier of nuclear components and fuel, for eight years before joining Axiom. Earlier, Cirtain spent nearly nine years in various roles at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. He previously co-founded a machine learning company specializing in Earth observation.

“Axiom Space is pioneering the commercialization of low-Earth orbit infrastructure while accelerating advancements in human spaceflight technologies,” Cirtain said. “I look forward to continuing our team’s important work of driving innovation to support expanded access to space and off-planet capabilities that will underpin the future of space exploration.”

Among other projects, Axiom is developing the world’s first commercial space station, creating next-generation spacesuits for astronauts and sending astronauts on low-Earth orbit missions.

Houston billionaire benefactors will donate almost entire fortune to charity

Giving Back

Houston billionaires Rich and Nancy Kinder plan to donate an astounding 95% of their multi-billion-dollar wealth to charities, they told ABC13's Melanie Lawson.

The news comes as the Kinder Foundation announced an $18.5 million expansion project for Emancipation Park in the heart of Third Ward. That historic park was founded by slaves in 1872.

The Kinders are one of the wealthiest couples in the nation, worth $11.4 billion, according to Forbes. You've certainly seen the Kinder name on buildings and facilities around the city of Houston.

The Kinders are also among the most generous, giving away hundreds of millions to Houston institutions and charities. Their plan is to give away almost all of their wealth, or more than $10 billion.

Rich Kinder helped build oil and gas pipeline giant Kinder Morgan, but he stepped down as CEO more than a decade ago for a what he calls a bigger cause.

"Well, I think we'd all like to leave the world a little better place than we found it," he said. "And we just felt early on that the right thing to do was to try to give most or all of that away. So that's what we plan to do during our lifetime and after our death."

They found kindred spirits as one of the first couples to sign The Giving Pledge, established by billionaires Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.

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Continue reading the full story, with video, on ABC13.com.