Houston pipeline heirs strike it rich as wealthiest family in Texas

AMERICA'S WEALTHIEST FAMILIES

Randa Williams is the high-profile heir of the Duncan family. Photo courtesy of Texas Monthly

Missouri has the Busches. Nebraska has the Buffetts. New York has the Hearsts. These are among the best-known wealthy families in the U.S.

Lesser-known nationally but well-known in Texas is the Duncan family of Houston, identified by FamilyMinded.com as the richest family in Texas. The website, which rounded up a list of the richest family in each state, pegs the family's estimated net worth at $26 billion; Forbes puts it at $25.6 billion.

The Duncan family comprises the four children of the late pipeline mogul Dan Duncan.

The children — Dannine Avara, Scott Duncan, Milane Frantz, and Randa Williams — inherited a tax-free $10 billion share of their father's estate following his death in 2010, when the so-called "death tax" had temporarily been repealed, according to Forbes. Each of them has an estimated net worth of $6.4 billion, Forbes says.

Williams is perhaps the most visible of the four Duncan heirs.

Williams is the only Duncan sibling who's involved in running the family business. She is chairwoman of Houston-based Enterprise Products Partners LP, the pipeline company that her father founded in 1968. Last year, the company posted revenue of $36.5 billion. In June, Williams made a big splash with her purchase of Austin-based Texas Monthly magazine.

While the Duncans are worth close to $26 billion, their wealth doesn't come close to that of Alice Walton of Fort Worth, the richest person in Texas. Forbes estimates her net worth at $52.4 billion.

FamilyMinded.com lists Alice Walton and her fellow heirs to the Walmart fortune as the richest family in Arkansas (where Walmart is based), with an estimated net worth of $163 billion. They're also the richest family in the U.S.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

Here's who you need to know this week in Houston innovation. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

Who's who

This group of innovators to know this week are passionate people. From starting companies to making acquisitions, here's what they are up to and why you need to know their names.

Kelly McCormick, director of RED Labs

Photo courtesy of UH

Kelly McCormick is in the business of making University of Houston's entrepreneurs' dreams into realities. The RED Labs director wrote a guest article for InnovationMap about side hustles — what they are and how to make them worth their while.

"A side hustle has a science to it, and more importantly, it has an art," she writes. Read her full article here.

Randa Duncan Williams, chairman of Enterprise Products Partners LP

Photo courtesy of Texas Monthly

For the second time in three years, Texas Monthly has a new owner. But if Randa Duncan Williams — energy exec and heiress worth over $6 billion — has anything to say about it, she'll be the last new owner of the magazine. Duncan Williams — who acquired the magazine by way of a privately held company, Enterprise Products Company, that's a subsidiary of Enterprise Products Partners, the company her late father founded — says she wants to own the magazine "forever." Read the full story here.

Cody Gremminger, system engineer at Cyber One Solutions

Cody Gremminger

Photo courtesy of Cyber One Solutions

Cody Gremminger is running a booming tech services business with his fiance, Brian Carrico. The company is called Cyber One Solutions and provides management, service and IT support services to the greater Houston area with satellite offices in Austin, Dallas, Lufkin, Brenham, and Beaumont.

While business couldn't be better, the entrepreneur wants to make sure Houston takes this month to remember the losses and challenges that the LGBT community has endured to get where it is today. Read the full story here.

Texas Monthly has a new owner. Texas Monthly/Facebook

Houston billionaire energy exec buys Texas Monthly

Media on media

For the second time in less than three years, Texas Monthly has a new owner. Randa Duncan Williams, chairman of Houston-based midstream oil and gas company, Enterprise Products Partners LP, has purchased the Austin-based magazine. The terms of the sale were not disclosed.

The magazine will become a part of Enterprise Products Company (EPCO), "a privately held company which owns interests in commercial real estate and ranching, as well as a substantial interest in Enterprise Products Partners L.P., a publicly traded midstream energy company," says a release.

"I have been an avid Texas Monthly reader since I was a teenager," says Duncan Williams, chairman of Texas Monthly, LLC, and of EPCO, in the release. "My family is delighted to provide the resources to support this iconic Texas institution which is nationally recognized for its editorial flair."

Williams is the daughter of EPP's late founder, Dan L. Duncan. She has a net worth of $6.2 billion, according to Forbes.

In TM's official statement, president Scott Brown is quoted as saying Duncan Williams wants to own the magazine "forever."

Forever may be what the magazine needs, following a tumultuous era for Texas Monthly, considered to be both a beacon of Texas culture and a shining example of long-form magazine journalism. In 2016, it was purchased from Emmis Communications by Genesis Park, a private investment firm led by Paul Hobby of the famed Houston-based Hobby family. Following that purchase, Hobby took over the role of chairman and CEO of the magazine, launching an arguably rocky tenure for Texas Monthly.

In February 2017, Hobby announced that Tim Taliaferro would be taking over the editor in chief position from Brian Sweany, a longtime TM staffer who climbed the ladder from intern in 1996 to taking the editor position following Jake Silverstein's departure for The New York Times Magazine in 2014. About a dozen notable writers left after Sweany's departure, though it's unfair to say it was a result of the masthead shakeup.

Just a few weeks into the Hobby-Taliaferro regime, journalism watchdog Columbia Journalism Review reported that Texas Monthly, a 13-time National Magazine Award winner, was going in a lifestyle direction. Reader reaction — not to mention the response from the journalism world — was swift, forcing the magazine to backpedal.

A year later, the magazine faced another misstep, this one involving Bumble and an alleged pay-for-play on social media. The somewhat salacious story also broke in the Columbia Journalism Review and eventually led to Taliaferro being moved into the newly created role of chief innovation officer. Thus began a year-long search that ended with Dan Goodgame being named editor in January 2019.

It's not breaking news to say it's an uncertain time for journalism, and Texas Monthly has clearly not survived unscathed. But hopefully Duncan Williams' purchase will help move the "national magazine of Texas" into a new era, one with a clear and bold vision.

For the sake of one of the nation's best magazines, we hope so.

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This article originally ran on CultureMap.

Is Texas still full of wildcatters — but for tech and innovation? Some say yes, but with one caveat. Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images

Houston's innovation ecosystem channels the wildcatter's spirit — but with one major difference

Tech boom

Historically, Texas has been a land of opportunity, and that might ring true now more than ever since the state's oil boom. As Houston's innovation ecosystem grows and develops, are these entrepreneurs reminiscent of the wildcatter days of the early 1900s? Well, sort of.

"Wildcatting is supposed to be really wild. You're supposed to go out in the field and drill some holes and hope that you find something," says Marc Nathan, vice president of strategy at Egan Nelson in Austin. "Truth is, we're a lot more deliberate than that these days."

Wildcatting and deliberate innovation development were the topics of discussion at a panel in Austin during SXSW. The panel, which was hosted by Rice Business and Texas Monthly, was comprised of three panelists with Houston ties: Gabriella Rowe, CEO of Station Houston, Lawson Gow, CEO and founder of Houston-based The Cannon, and Nathan, who, though based in Austin now, was born and raised in Houston and has done business in town too.

Wildcatting new industries
All three panelists agreed that the entrepreneurial nature of the wildcatters is alive and well within Texas entrepreneurs, just now spread apart multiple industries. Among all of the major Texas cities — or DASH, as Nathan calls it, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, and Houston — each has its specialty. Austin tends to specialize in consumer-facing technology, Dallas has a hold on B-to-B and transportation, and San Antonio has the military.

For Houston, which is most known for its energy, life sciences, and space technology, has some new territories it's growing in, says Rowe, from cybersecurity to sports technology. And all of these different industries seem to work together, which is encouraging to see for Rowe.

"That's the secret sauce that Houston has in many ways," Rowe says.

This ability to specialize is also what's also special about Houston. Rather than trying to compete with Austin and its consumer technology — Gow gave an example of a startup focusing on a doggy dating app — Houston is doing its own thing.

"What I love about Houston is we're trying to solve big problems," Gow, who is the son of InnovationMap's parent company's CEO, says. "We're not going to be the consumer software capital of the world and, for the most part, we're not going to mess around with doggy dating apps."

Houston's problems to overcome
One of the challenges Houston faces as an innovation ecosystem is access to funds. According to Nathan, putting money into tech is just not Houston investors are used to doing.

"Houstonians invest in the ground, with oil and gas, and on the ground, with real estate, but not in the cloud," Nathan says.

The reason being, Gow says, is investors tend to put money into industries they know, and there's a need for educating these investors in new industries.

"To compare to Austin, more people in Austin have tech startups that have been successful and they turn around and invest in what they know, which is tech startups," Gow says. "There's a generational effect."

Another challenge Houston faces is competition — but not with other Texas cities or the rest of the country. Competition between startups and accelerators for resources has the potential to hinder the city's growth as an ecosystem.

"We are fighting for very scarce resources — and it's not just money," Nathan says. "It's also talent."

Texas Monthly's chief innovation officer, Tim Taliaferro, moderated the panel. Natalie Harms/InnovationMap

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Houston VC funding surged nearly 50% in Q1 2026, report says

VC victories

First-quarter venture capital funding for Houston-area startups climbed nearly 50 percent compared to the same time last year, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

In Q1 2026, Houston-area startups raised $532.3 million, a 49 percent jump from $320.2 million in Q1 2025, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor.

However, the Q1 total fell 23 percent from the $671.05 million raised in Q4 2025.

Among the first-quarter funding highlights in Houston were:

  • Utility Global, which focuses on industrial decarbonization, announced a first close of $100 million for its Series D round.
  • Sage Geosystems raised a $97 million Series B round to support its geothermal energy storage technology.

Those funding rounds underscore Houston’s evolution as a magnet for VC in the energy sector.

“Today, the energy sector is increasingly extending into the startup economy as venture capital flows into companies developing the technologies that will shape the future of global energy,” the Greater Houston Partnership says.

The energy industry accounted for nearly 40 percent of Houston-area VC funding last year, according to market research and lead generation service Growth List.

Adding to Houston’s stature in VC for energy startups are investors like Chevron Technology Ventures, the investment arm of Houston-based oil and gas giant Chevron; Goose Capital; Mercury Fund; and Quantum Energy Partners.

How Houston innovators played a role in the historic Artemis II splashdown

safe landing

Research from Rice University played a critical role in the safe return of U.S. astronauts aboard NASA’s Artemis II mission this month.

Rice mechanical engineer Tayfun E. Tezduyar and longtime collaborator Kenji Takizawa developed a key computational parachute fluid-structure interaction (FSI) analysis system that proved vital in NASA’s Orion capsule’s descent into the Pacific Ocean. The FSI system, originally developed in 2013 alongside NASA Johnson Space Center, was critical in Orion’s three-parachute design, which slowed the capsule as it returned to Earth, according to Rice.

The model helped ensure that the parachute design was large enough to slow the capsule for a safe landing while also being stable enough to prevent the capsule from oscillating as it descended.

“You cannot separate the aerodynamics from the structural dynamics,” Tezduyar said in a news release. “They influence each other continuously and even more so for large spacecraft parachutes, so the analysis must capture that interaction in a robustly coupled way.”

The end result was a final parachute system, refined through NASA drop tests and Rice’s computational FSI analysis, that eliminated fluctuations and produced a stable descent profile.

Apart from the dynamic challenges in design, modeling Orion’s parachutes also required solving complex equations that considered airflow and fabric deformation and accounted for features like ringsail canopy construction and aerodynamic interactions among multiple parachutes in a cluster.

“Essentially, my entire group was dedicated to that work, because I considered it a national priority,” Tezduyar added in the release. “Kenji and I were personally involved in every computer simulation. Some of the best graduate students and research associates I met in my career worked on the project, creating unique, first-of-its-kind parachute computer simulations, one after the other.”

Current Intuitive Machines engineer Mario Romero also worked on Orion during his time at NASA. From 2018 to 2021, Romero was a member of the Orion Crew Capsule Recovery Team, which focused on creating likely scenarios that crewmembers could encounter in Orion.

The team trained in NASA’s 6.2-million-gallon pool, using wave machines to replicate a range of sea conditions. They also simulated worst-case scenarios by cutting the lights, blasting high-powered fans and tipping a mock capsule to mimic distress situations. In some drills, mock crew members were treated as “injured,” requiring the team to practice safe, controlled egress procedures.

“It’s hard to find the appropriate descriptors that can fully encapsulate the feeling of getting to witness all the work we, and everyone else, did being put into action,” Romero tells InnovationMap. “I loved seeing the reactions of everyone, but especially of the Houston communities—that brought me a real sense of gratitude and joy.”

Intuitive Machines was also selected to support the Artemis II mission using its Space Data Network and ground station infrastructure. The company monitored radio signals sent from the Orion spacecraft and used Doppler measurements to help determine the spacecraft's precise position and speed.

Tim Crain, Chief Technology Officer at Intuitive Machines, wrote about the experience last week.

"I specialized in orbital mechanics and deep space navigation in graduate school,” Crain shared. “But seeing the theory behind tracking spacecraft come to life as they thread through planetary gravity fields on ultra-precise trajectories still seems like magic."

Rice Alliance names first head of platform & more innovation headlines

Trending News

Editor's note: The top April innovation headlines to know include Rice Alliance's newly minted head of platform and FDA approval for a local medtech startup. Below are the five most-read InnovationMap stories from April 1-15, 2026:

1. Rice Alliance names Houston healthtech exec as first head of platform

The Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship has named its first head of platform. Houston entrepreneur Laura Neder stepped into the newly created role last month, according to an email from Rice Alliance. Neder will focus on building and growing Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform. The emerging platform, which is being promoted by Rice Alliance and the Ion, aims to connect founders with the "people, capital and expertise they need to scale." Continue reading.

2. Houston medtech startup clears FDA approval for new surgical tool

Prana Surgical has developed a minimally invasive, image-guided, single-use tissue extraction tool. Photo via LinkedIn

Houston-based Prana Surgical will soon bring a new electrosurgical tool to operating rooms around the country. The Prana System officially cleared U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval earlier this month. Prana Surgical began as Prana Thoracic in 2022. Back then, the company primarily focused on developing screening tools for lung cancer diagnosis. It raised $6 million in series A funding rounds in 2023 and 2024 before transitioning to broader surgical needs in 2025. Continue reading.

3. Houston leads U.S. in population growth for 2025, Census says

The 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. Photo via Getty Images

Imagine that the Houston metro area swallowed a city the size of Pearland in just one year. That’s essentially what happened from 2024 to 2025, with the Houston metro ranking first in the U.S. for population growth based on the number of people. New estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau show the 10-county Houston metro added 126,720 residents from July 1, 2024, to July 1, 2025. That’s just shy of Pearland’s roughly 133,000-resident tally. Continue reading.

4. 8+ can't-miss Houston business and innovation events in April


From the Rice Business Plan Competition to the Veterans Business Battle, here's what not to miss in April and how to register. Photo courtesy the Ion

Houston's weeklong innovation festival kicked off April, followed by Rice University's globally recognized pitch competition returning for its 26th year. Plus, find coworking pop-ups, industry meetups, pitch battles and even a crawfish boil on the calendar. Continue reading.

5. Houston unicorn closes $421M to fuel first phase of flagship energy project

Tim Latimer, CEO and co-founder of Fervo Energy. Photo courtesy of Fervo Energy

Houston geothermal unicorn Fervo Energy has closed $421 million in non-recourse debt financing for the first phase of its flagship Cape Station project in Beaver County, Utah. Fervo believes Cape Station can meet the needs of surging power demand from data centers, domestic manufacturing and an energy market aiming to use clean and reliable power. According to the company, Cape Station will begin delivering its first power to the grid this year and is expected to reach approximately 100 megwatts of operating capacity by early 2027. Fervo added that it plans to scale to 500 megawatts. Continue reading.

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