Houston startups win NASA funding for space tech projects

fresh funding

Houston startups were recently named among the nearly 300 recipients that received a portion of $44.85 million from NASA to develop space technology. Photo via NASA/Ben Smegelsky

Three Houston startups were granted awards from NASA this month to develop new technologies for the space agency.

The companies are among nearly 300 recipients that received a total agency investment of $44.85 million through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Phase I grant programs, according to NASA.

Each selected company will receive $150,000 and, based on their progress, will be eligible to submit proposals for up to $850,000 in Phase II funding to develop prototypes.

The SBIR program lasts for six months and contracts small businesses. The Houston NASA 2025 SBIR awardees include:

Solidec Inc.

Principal investigator: Yang Xia
Proposal: Highly reliable and energy-efficient electrosynthesis of high-purity hydrogen peroxide from air and water in a nanobubble facilitated porous solid electrolyte reactor

Rarefied Studios LLC

Principal investigator: Kyle Higdon
Proposal: Plume impingement module for autonomous proximity operations

The STTR program contracts small businesses in partnership with a research institution and lasts for 13 months. The Houston NASA 2025 STTR awardees include:

Affekta LLC

Principal investigator: Hedinn Steingrimsson
Proposal: Verifiable success in handling unknown unknowns in space habitat simulations and a cyber-physical system

Solidec and Affekta have ties to Rice University.

Solidec extracts molecules from water and air, then transforms them into pure chemicals and fuels that are free of carbon emissions. It was co-founded by Rice professor Haotian Wang and and was an Innovation Fellow at Rice’s Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. It was previouslt selected for Chevron Technology Ventures’ catalyst program, a Rice One Small Step grant, a U.S. Department of Energy grant, and the first cohort of the Activate Houston program.

Affekta, an AI course, AI assistance and e-learning platform, was a part of Rice's OwlSpark in 2023.

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Together, Little Place Labs and Loft Orbital are paving the way for a new era of rapid-response capabilities in space. Photo courtesy of Little Place Labs

Houston space data startup to compute real-time insights in orbit

out of this world

A Houston space startup has announced a new partnership that will “push the boundaries of real-time data processing and insight delivery.”

Little Place Labs is collaborating with San Francisco-based Loft Orbital to pair its low-latency operations, using its space infrastructure with LittlePlace Labs’ cutting-edge analytics. This will enhance maritime domain awareness under a US Air Force Phase 2 STTR by deploying Little Place Labs software to Loft’s YAM-6 satellite as a virtual mission.

“Our on-orbit data processing solutions, paired with Loft’s satellite platform, allow us to derive and deliver insights in near real-time for time-sensitive situations,” Little Place Labs Co-founder and CEO Bosco Lai says in a news release. “These insights are critical to commercial and national security stakeholders, including those in the US government. This collaboration highlights the new space age, where companies like Little Place Labs and Loft come together, integrating our solutions into powerful capabilities.”

Loft plans to deploy Little Place Labs’ applications to its constellation of satellites. Each satellite node will be equipped with a sensing resource like visible and infrared images, and configurable software-defined radios. The satellite nodes make up Loft’s space infrastructure, which will include onboard edge compute and connectivity resources. The infrastructure will be used to build and complete complex missions. The low-latency maritime domain awareness is an example of the complex challenges that won’t involve deployment of new hardware. This aligns with both companies goals to address real-time data solutions and rapid responses in space.

"We are proud to support customers like Little Place Labs in pushing the limits of what’s possible with low latency applications and onboard edge compute,” Mitchell Scher, director of business development at Loft, adds. “While we’re providing the infrastructure to support these kinds of low-latency operations, it is only as useful as the applications our customers deploy and the operational value they produce for their end users.”

Little Place Labs will be working with another military organization, as they were recently selected by AFWERX for a STTR Phase II contract in the amount of $1.8 million dollars. The focus will be “revolutionizing space- based ISR through decentralized systems,” per a news release. This will be done in-orbit ML computing for near-real-time intelligence to address challenges in the Department of the Air Force.

Another recent collaboration sees their Orbitfy software suite on LEOcloud’s Space Edge infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). This will help facilitate “scalable real-time data processing and analysis directly on spacecraft, significantly reducing downlink costs and enabling faster mission-critical insight,” according to a news release. The Orbitfy Software suite combines data preprocessing capabilities with low-SWaP machine learning applications that is designed for deployment directly on space infrastructures and satellites.

Little Place Labs is also using its satellite real-time solutions to help address wildfires. They were one of four companies part of the completion of the first round of the XPRIZE Autonomous Wildfire Challenge by the coalition Fire Foresight.

NASA doled out funding to 12 startups — and one from Houston makes the cut. Photo courtesy of re:3D

Houston 3D printing company lands funding from NASA

funds granted

Houston-based re:3D Inc was recently one of 12 innovative companies from around the country to be granted Phase II awards from a NASA small business initiative, the space giant announced earlier this week.

The grants of up to $850,000 are awarded to early-stage, high-risk technology concepts that could be commercialized for use in space and on Earth as part of NASA's SBIR Ignite pilot, which is part of NASA’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs.

The program was launched to support emerging companies "whose end customers may not be only NASA but are still creating technology that NASA cares about,” Jason L. Kessler, program executive for the NASA SBIR/STTR program, says in a previous statement. And it aims to attract companies that have not yet worked with NASA.

The concepts from the cohort have applications in climate resilience, low-cost solar cells and active debris remediation. Re:3D Inc.'s project looks to develop a recycling system that uses a 3D printer to turn thermoplastic waste generated in orbit into functional and useful objects, according to the project's proposal.

SBIR Ignite made its inaugural Phase I awards in 2022, granting about $2 million in total to the 12 companies, including re:3D Inc. The Phase II grants are intended to help the companies create their prototypes.

“We are proud that all 12 of the small businesses are continuing with our program and persevering through the tough realities of early-stage research and development,” Kessler said in a statement made this month. "These awards foster a unique range of technologies that we hope will have positive impacts on the lives of everyday Americans in the future."

Re3D Inc. is the only company from Texas in the cohort. The other 11 awarded companies and their projects include:

Ampaire Inc.: High Efficiency Powertrain for Hybrid Aircraft
Canopy Aerospace Inc.: Reusable Heatshields through Additive Manufacturing
Cecilia Energy: Catalytic Conversion of Waste Plastic to Hydrogen
Crystal Sonic Inc.: Reducing Cost of Space Photovoltaics via Sound-Assisted Substrate Reuse
H3X Technologies Inc.: HPDM-30 – A 10 kW/kg Integrated Motor Drive for UAV and Aircraft Electric Propulsion
Outpost Technologies Corporation: Outpost Cargo Ferry: A Rapid Cargo Downmass Vehicle
Solestial, Inc.: Next Generation Silicon Based Solar Arrays for Space Stations and Other Permanent Space Infrastructure
StormImpact Inc.: Optimizing vegetation management to improve the resilience of the electrical power system to extreme weather
Terrafuse, Inc.: Wildfire Mitigation through Explainable Risk Predictions
Trans Astronautica Corporation: Mini Bee Capture Bag for Active Debris Remediation
Turion Space Corp.: Low-Cost CubeSat for Active Removal of Sizable Space Debris Utilizing a Mothership Architecture

Re:3D Inc. was founded in 2013 by NASA contractors Samantha Snabes and Matthew Fiedler and is based in Clear Lake. It's known for its GigaBot 3D printer, which uses recycled materials to create larger devices.

Since its founding it's been named to numerous accelerators and has earned national recognition, like the Tibbetts Award from the U.S. Small Business Administration, which honors small businesses that are at the forefront of technology. It was selected by the SBA to participate in its inaugural America’s Seed Fund Startup Expo last year.

Co-founder Snabes spoke on the Houston Innovators Podcast in 2020. Click here to listen to the full, in-depth interview.

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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.

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

future focused

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

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