Elon Musk's SpaceX is about to make its debut on Wall Street

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With a SpaceX IPO, Musk could be the world's first trillionaire. Photo via Getty Images

Elon Musk's rocket company SpaceX will make its debut on Wall Street Friday, June 12, and both institutional and retail investors are expected to gobble up the 555.6 million shares going up for sale at $135 apiece. Musk, already the world's richest man, could become its first trillionaire.

SpaceX is likely to become the biggest IPO ever, with proceeds of around $75 billion. SpaceX hopes to become the first company to send people to Mars. In fact, part of Musk’s future compensation depends on SpaceX eventually establishing a colony of at least 1 million people on the red planet.

Why SpaceX is going public now

In a video conference on Musk's social media platform X, he told JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon that people have suggested for the last 10 years that he take SpaceX public. He's doing it now because the company plans to put 100,000 next-generation Starlink satellites into orbit. Deploying AI data centers in space is a “massive new growth base and you need capital for that,” he said.

Going public provides access to the capital that SpaceX needs. But it also exposes it to more scrutiny from shareholders and more regulatory oversight. That includes filing quarterly financial reports, which critics say incentivizes short-term thinking over longer-term planning and creates unnecessary costs for a company. Securities regulators are currently soliciting public comment on a proposal to require public companies to file the financial reports only twice every year.

How the IPO impacts the company

Musk will hold the majority of a special class of shares, giving him control over decisions related to company strategy, finances and personnel. On the latter, because of his ownership of most of these Class B shares, the only person who can fire Musk as CEO is Musk.

The company credits Musk with being the “driving force” behind its growth, innovation and success. But what happens if Musk is no longer in the picture? SpaceX warns that the loss of Musk could disrupt its ability to execute its strategy as well as hurt its “reputation and relationships with customers, partners and other stakeholders.”

The company also warns that finding a replacement with the same skills and experience as Musk would be time-consuming, if not nearly impossible. As Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives wrote Wednesday, “At the end of the day Musk is SpaceX and SpaceX is Musk.”

What could make or break SpaceX

Currently in the test phase, the gigantic reusable Starship rocket is key to SpaceX realizing Musk's ambitions. Much of the commercial space business hinges on SpaceX developing Starship’s capability to be fully reusable and hearty enough for a quick turnaround between flights. If that doesn't happen, SpaceX warns that putting data centers and satellites in space will take longer and cost more money, meaning it risks customers bailing on the company.

Analysts say that by pioneering reusable rockets, SpaceX has established a clear lead on competitors such as Blue Origin, led by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Starlink satellite business competes with, among others, AST SpaceMobile – which is relying on a SpaceX rocket to send its latest generation of satellites into orbit next week.

The prospectus filed last week says SpaceX’s biggest potential market is the sale of business-oriented artificial intelligence products designed to transform how people get work done. It’s an opportunity SpaceX predicts would be worth $22.7 trillion if it could somehow dominate rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI and Microsoft in a highly competitive industry. But the prospectus shows no clear path to profitability for the xAI business, which merged with SpaceX earlier this year.

Why Wall Street is paying attention

If the SpaceX IPO is as successful, the stock could quickly join the Nasdaq 100, a widely followed index that tracks the 100 largest non-financial companies in the composite. That's important because some popular funds, such as the $460 billion QQQ exchange-traded fund, mimic the index and will automatically buy whatever is listed in the index.

Nasdaq recently changed its rules to allow select companies to enter the Nasdaq 100 after just 15 trading days.

S&P Dow Jones Indices, on the other hand, is sticking to established and more traditional thresholds that will not allow SpaceX or other companies with gargantuan IPOs faster entry into its S&P 500 index. That means even high-profile companies will still need to wait for their stocks to trade a full 12 months before they can enter the index.

Companies want to be in the S&P 500 in particular because it's arguably the most important index on Wall Street, with trillions of dollars either mimicking it exactly or benchmarked against it. Vanguard's VOO fund that tracks the S&P 500 has roughly $950 billion invested in it, for example.

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The Texas bureau of the NYSE will open in 2026. Photo by Tomas Eidsvold on Unsplash

New York Stock Exchange Texas announces location for Dallas headquarters

NYSE Texas

A location has been chosen for The New York Stock Exchange Texas, the new Dallas-based offshoot of the The New York Stock Exchange in New York.

According to a release, the NYSE Texas has leased 28,000 square-feet of space at Old Parkland, the hospital-turned office space at 3819 Maple Ave. in Oak Lawn, where it will operate as a fully electronic equities exchange headquartered in Dallas. The property is owned by Dallas billionaire Harlan Crowe, who acquired it in 2006.

The NYSE is part of the Intercontinental Exchange, Inc., a global provider of technology and data. It was previously the NYSE Chicago, which will close once the bureau in Texas debuts.

They’ve also named a president to the Texas branch: Bryan Daniel, former chairman of the Texas Workforce Commission. In his new role over the NYSE Texas, Daniel will report to President of NYSE Group Lynn Martin.

Relocating from Chicago to Texas was a response to Texas' pro-business profile, Martin says in a statement.

“As the state with the largest number of NYSE listings, representing over $3.7 trillion in market value for our community, Texas is a market leader in fostering a pro-business atmosphere,” Martin says. “We are delighted to expand our presence in the Lone Star State, which plays a key role in driving our U.S. economy forward.”'

The move comes five months after the Texas Stock Exchange — AKA TXSE — announced plans to launch in Dallas and begin trading in 2026, pending approval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The Texas Stock Exchange is backed by financial giants such as BlackRock, Citadel Securities, and Charles Schwab.

The NYSE expects the Texas location to open in 2026, where it will operate electronically, with stocks trading across multiple venues regardless of where they are first listed, according to the release.

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This article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

There's no crystal ball, but this researcher from Rice University is trying to see if some metrics work for economic forecasting. Photo via Getty Images

Houston researcher tries to crack the code on the Fed's data to determine economic outlook

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Research by Rice Business Professor K. Ramesh shows that the Fed appears to harvest qualitative information from the accounting disclosures that all public companies must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

These SEC filings are typically used by creditors, investors and others to make firm-level investing and financing decisions; and while they include business leaders’ sense of economic trends, they are never intended to guide macro-level policy decisions. But in a recent paper (“Externalities of Accounting Disclosures: Evidence from the Federal Reserve”), Ramesh and his colleagues provide persuasive evidence that the Fed nonetheless uses the qualitative information in SEC filings to help forecast the growth of macroeconomic variables like GDP and unemployment.

According to Ramesh, the study was made possible thanks to a decision the SEC made several years ago. The commission stores the reports submitted by public companies in an online database called EDGAR and records the IP address of any party that accesses them. More than a decade ago, the SEC began making partially anonymized forms of those IP addresses available to the public. But researchers eventually figured out how to deanonymize the addresses, which is precisely what Ramesh and his colleagues did in this study.

"We were able to reverse engineer and identify those IP addresses that belonged to Federal Reserve staff," Ramesh says.

The team ultimately assembled a data set containing more than 169,000 filings accessed by Fed staff between 2005 and 2015. They quickly realized that the Fed was interested only in filings submitted by a select group of industry leaders and financial institutions.

But if Ramesh and his colleagues now had a better idea of precisely which bellwether firms the Fed focused on, they still had no way of knowing exactly what Fed staffers had gleaned from the material they accessed. So the team decided to employ a measure called "tone" that captures the overall sentiment of a piece of text – whether positive, negative, or neutral.

Building on previous research that had identified a set of words with negatively toned financial reports, Ramesh and his colleagues examined the tone of all the SEC filings accessed by Fed staff between one meeting of the Federal Open Markets Committee (FOMC) and the next. The FOMC sets interest rates and guides monetary policy, and its meetings provide an opportunity for Fed officials to discuss growth forecasts and announce policy decisions.

The researchers then examined the Fed's growth forecasts to see if there was a relationship between the tone of the documents that Fed staff examined in the period between FOMC meetings and the forecasts they produced in advance of those meetings.

The team found close correlations between the tone of the reports accessed by the Fed and the agency’s forecasts of GDP, unemployment, housing starts and industrial production. The more negative the filings accessed prior to an FOMC meeting, for example, the gloomier the GDP forecast; the more positive the filings, the brighter the unemployment forecast.

Ramesh and his colleagues also compared the Fed's forecasts with those of the Society of Professional Forecasters (SPF), whose members span academia and industry. Intriguingly, the researchers found that while the errors in the SPF's forecasts could be attributed to the absence of the tonal information culled from the SEC filings, the errors in the Fed’s forecasts could not. This suggests both that the Fed was collecting qualitative information that the SPF was not—and that the agency was making remarkably efficient use of it.

"They weren’t leaving anything on the table," Ramesh says.

Having solved one mystery, Ramesh would like to focus on another; namely, how does the Fed identify bellwether firms in the first place?

Unfortunately, the SEC no longer makes IP address data publicly available, which means that Ramesh and his colleagues can no longer study which companies the Fed is most interested in. Nonetheless, Ramesh hopes to use the data they have already collected to build a model that can accurately predict which firms the Fed is most likely to follow. That would allow the team to continue studying the same companies that the Fed does, and, he says, “maybe come up with a way to track those firms in order to understand how the economy is going to move.”

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and was based on research from K. Ramesh is Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Equity options can act as an alternative to credit default swaps for detecting a company’s credit risk. Photo via Getty Images

Rice research explains a new way to measure default risk for investors

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Up until the 2007-2009 financial crisis, credit default swaps (CDS) were a predominant method for predicting the probability of corporate default. CDS function like insurance for loan assets — if an asset defaults, the bank who purchased the CDS would recoup their loss. Higher-risk assets usually have higher premiums, and in this way the price of a CDS indicates the probability of default.

When the housing market crashed in 2007, the CDS market crashed along with it when banks had to pay out more than they had expected. The CDS market is not expected to ever return to its previous high, leaving a void in market-driven estimates for determining an asset’s default probability.

To fill that void, a team of researchers including Rice Business Professor Robert Dittmar created an alternative method for measuring default risk: equity options data. The team found that equity options not only correlate with CDS data in terms of accurate prediction of default but also provide additional insights on what types of assets are more likely to default, and when they will default.

There are two types of options, a call option, which is essentially a bet that a stock’s price will be higher than a contracted value (the strike price) and a put option, which is a bet that a stock’s price will be less than a contracted value.

A put is often viewed as an insurance contract — if you hold a stock, but also a put option on it, you limit your loss on the stock if the stock price falls.

“What we are looking at is essentially how expensive put options get,” says Dittmar. “If the market thinks a company is likely to default, it expects that its stock value will fall (almost to zero). As a result, put options, which represent insurance against this loss become more expensive. We are looking at how these option prices change to see if they inform us about the probabilities of default.”

According to Dittmar and his team, this approach has several advantages. 1) There are more stocks with options than CDS. 2) The CDS market is drying up whereas the option market remains liquid. And 3) Because of the nature of an option contract, and the fact that in principle equity holders have the lowest claim on a company’s assets, this approach may allow investors to predict losses in case of default.

The team looked at CDS quotes on 276 firms between 2002 and 2017, focusing attention on entities that had quote data available on one-year credit default swaps. The 15-year sample enabled the researchers to analyze the money lost through defaults over a longer period of time, including the 2007-2009 financial crisis.

Using equity options data as a predictor of default led to some interesting insights. First, there are two components that investors in corporate bonds think about when weighing default risk — the probability of default and (should there be a default) how much of the bond’s principal they will get back (i.e., recovery rate). “What we see is that credit ratings imply different levels of default thresholds, which may mean that investors believe that there are differences in the amount that debt holders will lose in the case of default,” says Dittmar.

Second, option-implied default probabilities correlate to historical changes in the economy. Default probabilities are higher in bad economic times and for firms with poorer credit ratings and financial positions. Default spikes are more likely during times of economic turbulence, such as the financial crisis of 2007-2009, which correlated with the decline of the CDS market after an onslaught of debt defaults during the recession. Assets are less likely to default during times of economic expansion. Over the period of 2013-2017, forecasted losses through defaults hovered around 15%.

The research sample ends in 2017, and the paper was published in 2020, about a month after the start of the coronavirus pandemic. Since then, there have been unprecedented changes in the economy, and some economists are anticipating another recession in 2023. With such instability in the market, multiple methods of predicting losses should be especially relevant. This research suggests that the equity options market may provide additional ways of finding the probability of these losses.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and was based on research from Robert Dittmar, professor of finance at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Earnings report delays generally lead to drops in stock prices. Disclosure can soften this market reaction. Photo via Getty Images

Houston research: Is no news always bad news in market reports?

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Investors eagerly wait for the news in their earnings reports. When these reports don't appear on the expected date, investors worry — and stock prices often fall as a result. But what if managers could present late reports in a way that spared their companies?

Research by K. Ramesh, a professor at Rice Business, shows that managers' approach to late earnings reports can profoundly affect market reaction. When firms put off filing a report, it's up to managers to decide whether to speak up or stay quiet. Those who choose to talk about a postponement then must decide how, what and how much to say.

All earnings delays, whether they're attended by a statement or not, prompt negative market reaction, prior research suggests. But in his research, Ramesh, Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting, wanted to learn more about the exact consequences of these late reports, and how managers can lessen the blowback.

To do this, Ramesh and a team of coauthors first looked at the incidence, timing and contents of a comprehensive sample of press releases announcing an earnings delay. Then they studied what those delays did to market value.

Conventional wisdom in the business press already suggested that investors viewed any announcement of a delayed earnings report as bad news. But finance theorists tell a more complicated story, one in which the market response might be partially shaped by managerial behavior. Subtle factors, they found, such as whether the impending delay is discussed or treated with silence, really can make a difference.

In the view of some theorists, merely announcing a delay can sometimes avert a drop in stock prices. Others argue that this isn’t necessarily the case, especially if the company discloses that the delay stemmed from legal concerns. The better approach: making it clear up front that reports aren't being postponed to hide disastrous information. But what if the information is indeed disastrous?

That may be the one case where disclosure won’t change much, Ramesh and his team found.

“Those companies that are in fact concealing disastrous results will experience no benefits (in the form of higher stock price) from revealing their true situation,” the research team wrote, “because the market will infer the worst from the manager’s decision not to announce the delay.” For this reason, they added, delayed earnings without a stated explanation prompt the most negative market reaction. As in so many areas of public relations, without a narrative, investors will infer a negative one of their own.

To better understand the impact of late reports, Ramesh and his coauthors built a comprehensive sample of 545 delay announcements by using a keyword search of the Dow Jones Factiva database between January 1, 1995, and December 31, 2009.

As conventional wisdom suggested, the study showed that announcements of late earnings reports led to negative market reactions. (Earlier studies have shown smaller firms are hit hardest by this dynamic, perhaps because investors assume large companies have more finely tuned financial reporting systems, so are less worried by their earnings delays).

Consistent with the anecdotal evidence, the average one-day abnormal stock return for the sample was -6.29 percent, while the median return was -2.27 percent. Both figures are economically and statistically significant.

The researchers next classified the announcements according to stated reason, dividing the delays into “Accounting” and “Non-Accounting” categories. “Accounting” explanations were subdivided into “Accounting Issue,” “Accounting Process” and “Rule Change.”

Meanwhile, “Non-Accounting” explanations were divided into “Business,” which linked the delay to some event such as divestitures or regulatory proceedings, and “Other,” which ranged from earthquakes to power outages. Finally, there were delays for no stated reason at all.

About two-thirds of the late announcements, the team found, were linked to accounting. When firms named a specific accounting issue as the cause for delay, the average abnormal return reached a statistically significant -8.15 percent. When managers explained that the accounting process was not complete, the average abnormal return was slightly lower, at -7.04 percent.

After accounting issues, business events drove most earnings delays. In theory, these events could have been either good or bad news. But the average abnormal return for the subsample was a statistically significant -3.74 percent — a reflection of the fact that most business events linked to late earnings reports tend to be negative.

Curiously, the average abnormal return for the grouping classified as “Other” was almost nil — at 0.53 percent. This suggests that the market does not penalize managers for events outside of their control that have little, if any, relevance to firm performance.

“No Reason,” the researchers found, was the most damaging explanation of all. Seven percent of the sample, or 37 out of 545 delays, came without a stated reason. The average abnormal return for these was a significant -10.41 percent, a greater negative number than the returns for any of the other reasons.

So what should managers do when a deadline is going to be busted? Bite the bullet and disclose the reasons, Ramesh suggests. For one thing, it helps limit legal exposure and preserve credibility. When the reason for the late report is innocuous, explaining to investors can also mitigate the market's displeasure. A caveat: While informing investors that a power outage caused earnings delay will calm jitters, disclosure may not make a difference if the company just can’t balance its books.

It's human nature, apparently, to read no news as bad news. Relaying something—anything—about the cause of a late report seems to soothe investors' nerves by preventing them from filling the silence themselves.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and was based on research from K. Ramesh, Tiago Duarte-Silva, Huijing Fu and Christopher F. Noe. K. Ramesh is the Herbert S. Autrey Professor of Accounting at Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University.

Research shows that some corporate executives skew earnings to influence the market and inflate share price. Photo via Pexels

Rice University research finds market outliers at risk of misreporting

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Say a company called CoolConsumerGoodsCo has just released its quarterly earnings report, revealing significantly higher profits than its consumer goods industry counterparts.

That result might spur analysts to slap a buy rating on the stock and investors to snap up shares. In an ideal world, the market wouldn't have to consider the possibility that the numbers aren't legit — but then again, it's not an ideal world. (Enron, anyone?)

Rice Business professors Brian R. Rountree and Shiva Sivaramakrishnan, along with Andrew B. Jackson at UNSW in Australia, studied what makes business leaders more likely to engage in fraudulent earnings reporting. Specifically, they focused on the relationship between this kind of misrepresentation and the degree to which a company's earnings are in line with the rest of its industry — a variable the researchers term "co-movements."

Many people are familiar with a similar variable, calculated using stock returns often referred to as a company's beta. The authors adapted the stock return beta to corporate earnings to see how a company's earnings move with earnings at the industry level.

The researchers hypothesized that the less in sync a company's earnings are with its industry, the higher the chance a company's leaders will manipulate earnings reports. They started with the well-accepted premise that corporations try to skew earnings reports to influence the market. The primary motive is typically to raise the company's stock price, as when an executive tries to "choose a level of bias" that balances potential fallout of getting caught against the benefits of a higher stock price.

To test their prediction, the professors analyzed a sample of enforcement actions taken by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission against companies for problematic financial reporting from 1970 to 2011 — although they noted that given the SEC's limited resources, the number of enforcement actions probably underestimates the actual amount of earnings manipulation in the market.

Their analysis revealed that firms with low earnings co-movements (meaning their earnings were out of sync with industry peers) were more likely to be accused by the SEC of reporting misdeeds. They concluded that the degree of earnings co-movement determines the probability of earnings manipulation. Put another way, earnings co-movements are a "causal factor" in the chances of earnings manipulations — and to a significant degree. The researchers found that firms who don't co-move with the market are more than 50 percent more likely to face an SEC enforcement action, compared with firms who are perfectly aligned with the market.

The researchers drilled deeper into the data to study whether the odds changed depending on the industry, since past research has indicated that the amount of competition in an industry works to constrain misreporting. That premise seems to hold true, the researchers concluded. In industries with more competitive markets, the impact of low co-movement on earnings manipulation is moderated.

They also studied whether the age of a firm played a part in the likelihood of earnings manipulation. Newer firms often rely more on stock compensation, which could be a motive for manipulating earnings reporting to drive up share price. Indeed, younger firms were more susceptible to misreporting when their earnings were out of whack with the rest of the marketplace.

Every firm faces some risk of misreporting, however. Even for public companies under analyst scrutiny, low co-movement proved to be a driver of earnings manipulation. But companies known for conservative reporting tend to be less likely to exaggerate their earnings, in general; these firms typically recognize losses in a more timely manner, the professors found.

These findings suggest a number of future lines of research. For example: When do executives underreport earnings? And can analyzing patterns related to cash flow reporting help better isolate earnings manipulation?

In the meantime, if you come across a company like CoolConsumerGoodsCo with an earnings report that's widely out of sync with the rest of its industry, you might think twice before rushing to buy in.

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This article originally ran on Rice Business Wisdom and is based on research from Brian R. Rountree, an associate professor of accounting at the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University, and Shiva Sivaramakrishnan is the Henry Gardiner Symonds Professor of Accounting at Rice Business.

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23 Houston companies rank among America’s most future-ready businesses

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By one measure, Spring-based tech giant Hewlett Packard Enterprises reigns as the most future-ready Houston-area company on the S&P 500 stock index.

HPE sits at No. 72 in a first-time ranking of the best S&P 500 companies for the future. Including HPE, 23 Houston-area companies appear on the list.

Published by The Wall Street Journal, the ranking was created by Bendable Labs for the WSJ Leadership Institute. It evaluates how S&P 500 companies stack up in six areas: AI readiness, innovation, talent readiness, financial fitness, resilience and agility. To be ranked, a company had to be part of the S&P 500 as of Dec. 31.

Among the six categories, HPE ranked highest for innovation (No. 30) among local companies. The WSJ didn’t say why HPE scored so well for innovation. However, the company stands out in this category thanks to:

  • Creation of the El Capitan and Frontier supercomputing systems
  • Research into photonic computing and quantum networking
  • Last year’s $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks, giving HPE an edge in AI-native networking
  • Establishment of the everything-as-a-service GreenLake hybrid cloud platform for data centers, colocation facilities and edge computing environments

In an interview with the Six Five podcast at HPE Discover 2025 in Las Vegas, CEO Antonio Neri said the company’s strategy is “basically founded on innovation, and that innovation drives shareholder value over the long term.”

While HPE fared well in the innovation category, it ranked toward the bottom for financial fitness. What’s behind the No. 430 ranking in the financial category? HPE’s low score likely reflects a debt-heavy acquisition strategy coupled with a historically low-margin hardware business.

Here’s the full list of the 23 Houston-area companies included in the ranking of the best companies for the future:

  • No. 72 Hewlett Packard Enterprise
  • No. 105 SLB
  • No. 120 Baker Hughes
  • No. 125 ConocoPhillips
  • No. 158 NRG Energy
  • No. 176 Targa Resources
  • No. 185 Chevron
  • No. 195 Halliburton
  • No. 223 Coterra Energy
  • No. 229 Waste Management
  • No. 235 Exxon Mobil
  • No. 250 Kinder Morgan
  • No. 257 Quanta Services
  • No. 276 CenterPoint Energy
  • No. 285 Sysco
  • No. 313 Occidental Petroleum
  • No. 318 Camden Property Trust
  • No. 333 EOG Resources
  • No. 365 LyondellBasell Industries
  • No. 373 Comfort Systems USA
  • No. 401 Crown Castle
  • No. 408 Phillips 66
  • No. 500 APA

Uber, Nuro and Lucid plan to roll out robotaxi services in Houston

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More autonomous vehicles are expected to hit the roads in Houston next year.

Ridesharing giant Uber announced that it plans to roll out its premium robotaxi service in the Bayou City in mid-2027. Houston will be Uber’s second planned market for the program, following the San Francisco Bay Area, where the program is expected to be rolled out later this year.

Uber, Nuro and Lucid Group will bring the robotaxi program to Houston with more markets planned for the future. Currently, Nuro is conducting autonomous on-road testing with safety operators in Houston. Testing includes simulation, closed-course testing and supervised public-road testing.

“Houston is a city Nuro knows well, and we’re excited to help bring this robotaxi service to the city through our partnership with Uber and Lucid,” Andrew Chapin, chief operating officer at Nuro, said in a news release. “Houston’s large, complex metro area is an ideal market for demonstrating how Nuro’s universal autonomy platform can generalize across different geographies and operating environments. We look forward to continued engagement with the community as we prepare to launch service in 2027.”

The fleet of 100 vehicles across California and Texas will feature Lucid Gravity EVs and future Lucid Midsize vehicles equipped with Nuro Driver technology, Nuro’s Level 4 universal autonomy platform, plus a redundant sensor suite with cameras, lidar, radar and a roof-mounted halo.

The vehicles will be owned and operated by Uber and its fleet partners and made available to riders through the Uber network, according to the company.

In addition to the fleet of autonomous vehicles, Uber also announced that it has secured a 50,000-square-foot depot facility and dedicated charging pitstop in Houston. The facility will allow Uber and its partners to control vehicle maintenance, repairs, charging, cleaning, and day-to-day operations.

“Houston marks an important next step in our partnership with Lucid and Nuro as we expand autonomous mobility to more riders throughout the world,” Sarfraz Maredia, global head of autonomous mobility & delivery at Uber, added in the release. “Together, we’re combining best-in-class vehicle and autonomy technology with Uber’s scale, fleet operations expertise, and infrastructure capabilities to build a service that can grow across dozens of markets in the years ahead.”

Waymo launched its autonomous vehicle program in Houston in February.

The company later suspended its driverless car services in Houston, other major Texas cities, and Atlanta, after one of its vehicles was stranded by flooding during heavy rains. However, according to the Houston Chronicle, the fleet has resumed activity in Houston and is fully active.

Houston fintech company closes $7M funding round

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Houston-based fintech company Receipts Depositary Corporation has closed a $7 million oversubscribed funding round and plans to scale.

The round was led by Austin-based LiveOak Ventures, with participation from Hivemind Capital, Onigiri Capital, OTC Markets Group, GTS, and Redbeard Ventures, according to a release from RDC.

RDC's platform issues depositary receipts (DRs) to qualified investors on digital and alternative assets, making it easier for investors to buy and trade hard-to-access and less traditional assets. Currently, the company offers DRs for cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana and XRP.

RDC says the new funding will allow it to launch new DR products across a wider range of asset categories, potentially including commodities. Additionally, it plans to grow its relationships with "banks, broker-dealers, market makers, custodians and exchange partners" and add to its product, operations, technology, and commercial functions teams. The company is actively hiring, according to a press release.

“Depositary Receipts are trusted, regulated capital markets products which RDC is bringing to an entirely new universe of assets, from commodities to digital assets, that have historically been out of reach of traditional securities markets," Krishna Srinivasan, founding partner at LiveOak Ventures, said the release. “The team's depth of experience in the DR business on a global scale, combined with the broad institutional validation from co-investors, anchor customers, and strategic partners across asset classes, makes RDC uniquely positioned to define this category. We're proud to lead this round and support the company as it scales.”

RDC was founded in 2022 by three Citibank alumni: CEO Ankit Mehta, CEO Bryant Kim and COO Ishaan Narain. It began offering its first DRs for Bitcoin in 2024.

“This funding round is a strong validation of what we’re building at RDC and the growing demand for modernized Depositary Receipt infrastructure,” Mehta added in the release. “With the support of LiveOak Ventures and our investor partners, we are accelerating development across our DR platform expanding our market reach, and building the team needed to support the next generation of DR product

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