Tech-enabled shopping software taking Texas by storm

Fashion forward

This digital shopping assistant relocated to Texas last year to focus on the business-friendly market. Courtesy of ModeSens

Former Microsoft engineer Brian Li wanted to help his wife, Jing Leng, a personal shopper, make smart purchases for her clients seeking luxury clothing. The couple found it impractical and time consuming to sift through multiple websites in search of clothing that was the best fit.

Li, now CEO of ModeSens, was inspired in 2015 to develop a personal shopping tool. The name comes from rearranging the French phrase "sens de la mode," which means "fashion sense."

"It started out as something that Brian worked on in his free time. But after they started using it, they realized that other people would find it useful," says Krystle Craycraft, CMO of ModeSens. "Another resource like this does not exist. We are the only company that aggregates information at the product level, presenting information to consumers in a way that is easy to navigate, and all in one place."

Since launching in 2015 in Seattle, the company relocated to Texas last year. Now, headquartered in Dallas, the company is building a large pool of users in major cities throughout Texas. ModeSens sees a growing connection with Houston in terms of customers and fashion retailers.

Li moved the business "because Texas is a good place to do business," Craycraft says. "Many businesses are following the trend of moving to Texas because of the great climate to do business in. We love Texas."

ModeSens, using its database of information, gives luxury fashion shoppers important information about products as they search, making for a more efficient, satisfying purchase. For a given item, ModeSens provides members a list of retailers who have the item in stock, the price comparison across retailers, available colors, designer information, product reviews, special promotions, and more.

You can download the free app, create a free account, and start saving on luxury goods by searching the site or scanning barcodes in the store. As ModeSens specializes in luxury goods, they partner with almost 200 brands such as Neiman Marcus, SAKS, Gucci, Dolce & Gobana, Lane Crawford and other premier designers.

"We connect with clients through several different affiliate networks as well as direct partnerships," says Craycraft. ModeSens partners exclusively with high-end retailers, filling a specific niche for the first time.

Leng, serving as the Fashion Director at ModeSens, works with these retail partners, curating content and promoting their products in a way that helps customers buy confidently.

"The customer is the focus of ModeSens; getting them what they need to make an informed decision is our top priority," says Craycraft. "Other fashion shopping platforms show products from Forever 21 all the way up to luxury brands, but for our customers looking for luxury products, a lot of those stores are just not relevant to them. Sorting through them becomes tedious."

ModeSens puts the answers to at customers' questions at their fingertips, once signed up with a free membership.

With the brand-new release of the barcode scanning feature, customers can have access to the same comparative information while physically in a store, as well as online.

"This is a total game-changer in the industry; there is no one else doing this," says Craycraft.

Using the app, shoppers simply scan the barcode of any of the many retailers who are partnered with ModeSens, revealing detailed information that can guide their purchase.

ModeSens is building an online community of luxury shoppers that can collaborate to find exactly what they are looking for in an authentic way. Through the website, members can upload pictures of the products that they have acquired, write reviews, provide helpful information to others, and ask questions.

"We want this to be a place where anyone can share their thoughts, and photos without feeling too intimidated to contribute," Craycraft says.

OrchidBox's smart terrarium fits on your desktop. Courtesy OrchidBox

Desktop terrarium startup promises plants that never die

Growing business

A Dallas startup has invented a smart terrarium with minimal maintenance designed to keep your plants alive. Called OrchidBox, it handles everything from easy succulents to hard-to-grow plants like the Venus flytrap.

The technology senses when the plant needs water and syncs with the sun for proper lighting.

Founder Nathan Hollis, a 26-year-old Dallas native, used his background in computer science and his love of plants to create an acrylic box equipped with LED lighting and a watering system.

The box measures 4x4x7 inches — small enough to fit on your work desk or bedside table. You can grow any plant that fits inside the box. An app allows you to select a pre-designed environment for your plant, and you can set a schedule for how much light and water it needs.

Hollis has a huge plant collection at home, some of which he has owned for seven years.

"It's sad, I don't think young people understand just how diverse our wildlife is, and we are losing more and more plant species every day," he says.

The name OrchidBox was selected to educate people about plant varieties and endangered species.

"While most people think of the stereotypical store-bought orchids, there are actually 50,000 species of orchids, some that are very, very bizarre," he says. "Most people don't know that, and some don't even know what an orchid is, so we wanted to take the opportunity to teach people."

The mini terrarium concept has been three years in the making. When he was in college, Hollis utilized his programming and mechanical engineering education to make climate-controlled devices that were larger, before sizing down his design to something that could adorn people's tabletops.

The company has competitors, such as Biopod Smart Microhabitat and EcoQube Air, but OrchidBox is the only company with a patent, said Taylor Mason, whose company It Crowd Marketing is helping Hollis with the media buzz.

Hollis had a full-time job but quit in February to focus exclusively on this venture. The product is available for pre-order which you can do here.

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This story originally appeared on CultureMap.

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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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