3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes Timmeko Moore Love of Greentown Houston, Anshumali Shrivastava of ThirdAI, and Ghazal Qureshi of UpBrainery. Photos courtesy

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from edtech to climatetech — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Timmeko Moore Love, general manager of Greentown Houston

Timmeko Moore Love has been named Greentown Houston's inaugural general manager. Photo courtesy of Greentown

Greentown Houston has named Timmeko Moore Love as Houston general manager and senior vice president of Greentown Labs. She'll lead Greentown Houston’s team and business operations, while growing the location's membership.

Love has 20 years of experience in innovation management, per the news release, and was the first Black woman at a Fortune 500 to lead a venture capital program. In that role, which was at The Woodlands-based Entergy Corp., she was named to the 2020 Global Corporate Venturing Powerlist. Love also oversaw corporate ventures at Mayo Clinic and Best Buy Capital.

“Greentown Labs is committed to ensuring founders’ success and is an agent of action in the fight against climate change,” says Love in the release. “I am excited to continue my service to the Greater Houston climate innovation ecosystem through this esteemed platform, and partner internally and externally to evolve and expand our services and programs.” Read more.

Anshumali Shrivastava, co-founder and CEO of ThirdAI

Anshumali Shrivastava also serves as an associate professor of computer science at Rice University. Photo via rice.edu

Anshumali Shrivastava's career has evolved alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. Now, he believes his company represents the future of the industry's widespread implementation.

Shrivastava, who's also a professor at Rice University, founded ThirdAI, pronounced "third eye," in 2021 to democratize artificial intelligence through software innovations. As Shrivastava explains on the Houston Innovators Podcast, AI processes have historically been run on larger, less accessible computing hardware. ThirdAI's tools are able to run on a regular central processing unit, or CPU, rather than the more powerful graphics processing unit, or GPU.

"We focus on the problems that people are facing in the current AI ecosystem," Shrivastava says on the podcast. "Right now, if you are to build some of the large-language models and (linear programming) models, you need a lot of computing power, dedicated engineers to move it, and, even if you are using fully managed services, it's costly and there are a lot of privacy implications because you have to move data around." Read more and stream the episode.

Ghazal Qureshi, CEO of UpBrainery

Ghazal Qureshi's Houston-based startup has advanced to the semifinal round of a prestigious national competition. Photo courtesy of Idea Lab Kids

UpBrainery, an immersive educational technology platform that customizes lessons for students, received $20,000 in seed funding from the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Visionary Interdisciplinary Teams Advancing Learning (VITAL) prize challenge. The $6 million prize challenge is cosponsored by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Schmidt Futures, and the Walton Family Foundation.

“This incredible achievement reflects our commitment to pushing the boundaries of knowledge and technology,” UpBrainery states in a LinkedIn announcement.

In addition to the seed money, UpBrainery will be partnered with a mentor to help them improve the logistics of their exploratory learning and AI aided platform, with a focus on developing their minimum viable prototype. Read more.

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Anshumali Shrivastava joins the Houston Innovators Podcast to share the revolutionary work ThirdAI is doing for artificial intelligence. Photo via rice.edu

How this Houston innovator is making AI accessible, personal, and safe

HOUSTON INNOVATORS PODCAST EPISODE 198

Anshumali Shrivastava's career has evolved alongside the rise of artificial intelligence. Now, he believes his company represents the future of the industry's widespread implementation.

Shrivastava, who's also a professor at Rice University, founded ThirdAI, pronounced "third eye," in 2021 to democratize artificial intelligence through software innovations. As Shrivastava explains on the Houston Innovators Podcast, AI processes have historically been run on larger, less accessible computing hardware. ThirdAI's tools are able to run on a regular central processing unit, or CPU, rather than the more powerful graphics processing unit, or GPU.

"We focus on the problems that people are facing in the current AI ecosystem," Shrivastava says on the podcast. "Right now, if you are to build some of the large-language models and (linear programming) models, you need a lot of computing power, dedicated engineers to move it, and, even if you are using fully managed services, it's costly and there are a lot of privacy implications because you have to move data around."



These are some of the challenges for AI development, and, as Shrivastava points out, this process isn't even accessible for 90 percent of the world that lacks the infrastructure to do it. And, even for companies that can afford to invest in the dedicated GPU hardware, there's a global chip shortage.

ThirdAI's solution? Enable AI processes on the hardware that is accessible — CPUs.

"That is what our product offerings are — the AI ecosystem on commodity infrastructure," he says, explaining that ThirdAI's goal is also to improve existing AI applications.

One specific AI application that ThirdAI is making more effective for its customers is search tools in ecommerce. The need to make online shopping searches as quick and as accurate as possible directly affects the company's ability to complete the transaction. Wayfair tapped into ThirdAI's tech to address its latency in its on-site searching.

"Their problem was in the domain of making language models and search engines, which are AI based, very efficient," Shrivastava says. "We were able to bring down (latency) significantly with our technology."

One AI application that's taken off over the past few years is the chat-based model — led by OpenAI's ChatGPT. As exciting as the prospect of navigating information via chatbot is, many companies, understandably, have privacy concerns.

ThirdAI created PocketLLM to address this concern. The platform, which ThirdAI offers for free, operates completely on the harddrive of the owner of the data, meaning your data stays with you.

"ChatGPT has shown the world what is possible," Shrivastava says, explaining that 80 or 90 percent of use cases are people or companies wanting to take their knowledge and data and turn it into an AI chat tool. "What people want is a ChatGPT-kind of agent on their data, but they don't want their proprietary data to be leaked to the outer world."

"Because I can build AI where your data is, your data never have to leave your ecosystem. PocketLLM is a demonstration of that capability," Shrivastava continues. "It's a tool that uses our software stack and essentially looks at your data and builds this chat agent and offers you an air-gapped privacy."

Shrivastava explains that the tool can be used for enterprises or even personal applications — like navigating past conversations on email, seeing as no email provider seems to have an optimized search option.

PocketLLM is just one thing ThirdAI is working on. Shrivastava explains that the company is developing an entire ecosystem of tools that can be used on CPUs.

"If AI is going to be an agent, it better be personalized," he says, explaining that no one AI will have the right answer for everyone.

Shrivastava shares more about the future of both AI and ThirdAI, which is growing to keep up with demand. Listen to the interview here — or wherever you stream your podcasts — and subscribe for weekly episodes.

ThirdAI's new PocketLLM app is free to use and completely secure. Photo via Getty Images

Houston startup launches innovative chat tool on its mission to democratize AI

smart tech

Artificial intelligence has a big potential to disrupt the technology industry, and one Houston company that was founded by a computer science professor at Rice University, is fast on its way to help lead that future now in a convenient and affordable way.

Founded by Anshumali Shrivastava and Tharun Medini, a recent Ph.D. who graduated under Shrivastava from Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, ThirdAI is building AI deep learning tools that aim to be sustainable and scalable to fit the changing needs of the industry. The company is on a mission to democratize AI, Shrivastava tells InnovationMap.

Shrivastava likes to use the word efficiently when describing what makes ThirdAI different, and how its programs can teach AI via multiple avenues to be what he refers to as “1,000 times more efficient.”

“The carbon footprint of these models are off the charts, and so expensive,” Shrivastava. “We believe this could be made efficient. … We use the same ideas that were developed, but we do it on a massive scale.”

ThirdAI's latest tool is a multilingual ChatGPT-like AI training tool PocketLLM app. Announced earlier this month, the tool is free. According to the company, users have access to a personalized chatbot that understands what the user is searching within documents, and can be fine-tuned to help elaborate your thoughts through a neural search.

ThirdAI's PocketLLM app is free to use. Image courtesy of ThirdAI

The app is private and secure and runs on deep-learning algorithms according to Vinod Iyengar, head of product at ThirdAI, and no one — not even ThirdAI — has access to the documents except the user.

“Tools exist to help people search text files, but that requires sharing your data with third parties,” says Iyengar in a news release. “Our solution is private and secure, powered by deep learning algorithms. And it returns results lightning fast.”

The process includes the user installing the app, uploading any text document files, and clicking "train." Minutes later, you have an AI tool that can process the information in those documents.

“The neural search encourages you to elaborate on your thoughts with details in the discover window and see the difference in results,” says Shrivastava in the release. “It can also be fine-tuned to your tastes by selecting the relevant option and hitting the update button to re-train."

In September of 2021, ThirdAI — pronounced "third eye" — raised $6 million in seed funding. The round was invested in by three California-based VCs — Neotribe Ventures and Cervin Ventures, which co-led the round with support from Firebolt Ventures. The technology ThirdAI is working with comes from 10 years of deep learning research and innovation. The company's technology has the potential to make computing 15-times faster, the company reports.

Anshumali Shrivastava is an associate professor of computer science at Rice University. Photo via rice.edu

This week's roundup of Houston innovators includes former city council member Amanda Edwards, Gaurav Khandelwal of Velostics, and Anshumali Shrivastava of ThirdAI. Courtesy photos

3 Houston innovators to know this week

who's who

Editor's note: In this week's roundup of Houston innovators to know, I'm introducing you to three local innovators across industries — from logistics tech to computer science — recently making headlines in Houston innovation.

Amanda Edwards, former Houston City Council Member

Amanda Edwards worked with local female leaders to launch BEAMW. Photo via LinkedIn

A couple years ago, Houston City Council Member Amanda K. Edwards, along with entrepreneurs Carolyn Rodz and Courtney Johnson Rose, formed a task force to provide Mayor Sylvester Turner with recommendations about increasing increase access to capital for minority- and women-owned business enterprises and assisting these business owners in scaling up their businesses. The task force created the Houston Small Business Community Report, which shed light on the disparities in access to resources for women and BIPOC-founders.

In response to this report, Edwards and a cohort of female leaders have launched the Business Ecosystem Alliance for Minorities and Women, or BEAMW, to address these disparities these businesses face when seeking capital and attempting to scale their businesses.

"It is not enough to state that Houston is the most diverse city in the country; we must be the city where the challenges that diverse communities face are solved," Edwards says in a release. Click here to read more.

Gaurav Khandelwal, CEO and founder of ChaiOne and Velostics

Serial entrepreneur says he sees logistics innovation as a "massive opportunity" for Houston. Photo courtesy

Gaurav Khandelwal has been an advocate for growing Houston's innovation ecosystem since he started his company ChaiOne — an industrial software provider — in 2008. Now, with his new company, Velostics, he is passionate about making Houston a hub for logistics innovation too.

"I think that there are some trends in Houston that I'm seeing as a founder, and one of them is logistics," Khandewal says on this week's episode of the Houston Innovators Podcast.

"If you look at Chicago — it's had some crazy amount of logistics unicorns that have popped up over the past few years, and they aren't slowing down," Khandewal says on the show. "Houston, I would argue, is better positioned, because we have this massive port. I think logistics is a massive opportunity for Houston." Click here to read more and listen to the episode.

Anshumali Shrivastava, CEO and co-founder of ThirdAI

Anshumali Shrivastava is also an associate professor of computer science at Rice University. Photo via rice.edu

A seed-stage company is changing the game for data science and artificial intelligence, and the technology was developed right on the Rice University campus.

ThirdAI, founded by Anshumali Shrivastava in April, raised $6 million in a seed funding round from three California-based VCs — Neotribe Ventures and Cervin Ventures, which co-led the round with support from Firebolt Ventures.

"We are democratizing artificial intelligence through software innovations," says Shrivastava in a news release from Rice. "Our innovation would not only benefit current AI training by shifting to lower-cost CPUs, but it should also allow the 'unlocking' of AI training workloads on GPUs that were not previously feasible." Click here to read more.

This Houston startup has a game-changing technology for deep learning. Photo via Getty Images

Houston artificial intelligence startup raises $6M in seed funding

money moves

A computer science professor at Rice University has raised seed funding last month in order to grow his company that's focused on democratizing artificial intelligence tools.

ThirdAI, founded by Anshumali Shrivastava in April, raised $6 million in a seed funding round from three California-based VCs — Neotribe Ventures and Cervin Ventures, which co-led the round with support from Firebolt Ventures.

Shrivastava, CEO, co-founded the company with Tharun Medini, a recent Ph.D. who graduated under Shrivastava from Rice's Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Medini serves as the CTO of ThirdAI — pronounced "third eye." The startup is building the next generation of scalable and sustainable AI tools and deep learning systems.

"We are democratizing artificial intelligence through software innovations," says Shrivastava in a news release from Rice. "Our innovation would not only benefit current AI training by shifting to lower-cost CPUs, but it should also allow the 'unlocking' of AI training workloads on GPUs that were not previously feasible."

The technology ThirdAI is working with comes from 10 years of deep learning research and innovation. The company's technology has the potential to make computing 15-times faster.

"ThirdAI has developed a breakthrough approach to train deep learning models with a large number of parameters that run efficiently on general purpose CPUs. This technology has the potential to result in a gigantic leap forward in the accuracy of deep learning models," per and announcement from Cervin Ventures. "Our investment in ThirdAI was a no-brainer and we are fortunate to have had the opportunity to invest."

Anshumali Shrivastava is an associate professor of computer science at Rice University. Photo via rice.edu

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Tech giant Apple opens Advanced Manufacturing Center at massive Houston facility

up and running

Cupertino, California-based Apple Inc. unveiled its Advanced Manufacturing Center in the Houston area last week, marking the completion of the second of three facilities the tech giant plans to launch in the city by the end of this year.

The 20,000-square-foot training center will welcome small- and medium-sized businesses for free training and educational sessions to "help accelerate smart manufacturing across America," according to a release from Apple. Apple opened a similar Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit last year.

The AMC is part of Apple's 500,000-square-foot site in northwest Harris County. It also features a massive manufacturing site for Apple’s advanced AI servers and Mac mini. The facility was originally slated to open in 2026, but Apple began producing its advanced AI servers ahead of schedule in 2025.

The company said it plans to begin manufacturing its Mac mini at the site this year. The move will bring production of the compact desktop computer to the U.S. for the first time.

“In less than nine months, we have invested hundreds of millions of dollars into this Houston facility. We stood up a factory, started production, and shipped the first advanced AI servers off the line. Today, we’re thrilled to open our new Advanced Manufacturing Center, a place where businesses, workers, and students can learn the same innovative processes that we use to make Apple’s most groundbreaking products. And we’re pleased to begin Mac mini production later this year,” Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said in the news release. “We believe in American workers and American ingenuity, and we are moving at an incredible pace because we want to build more than great products. We want to build the future of American manufacturing.”

Apple's Advanced Manufacturing Center. Photos courtesy Apple

Apple's Houston expansion is part of a $600 billion commitment the company made to the U.S. in 2025.

The company originally announced plans in February 2025 to open a 250,000-square-foot Houston factory, but doubled the facility's planned size about a year later. Apple has reported that the factory will employ thousands of workers.

“Houston is grateful to Apple for this significant investment in our city. The Advanced Manufacturing Center will create local jobs and will continue improving the quality of life of Houston residents," Houston Mayor John Whitmire added in the release. "The AMC also recognizes our city as a growing technology hub and solidifies Houston’s leadership in the manufacturing sector of the United States.”

The opening comes on the heels of New Jersey-based pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb Co. officially naming Houston home of its new $2.3 billion, state-of-the-art manufacturing site. Read more here.

Nominations for the 2026 Houston Innovation Awards are due by Aug. 27

Calling All Innovators

Calling all Houston innovators: The 2026 Houston Innovation Awards, presented by InnovationMap, return this fall to celebrate the best and brightest in the Houston innovation ecosystem right now.

We're asking you to nominate Houston's top innovators and startups for this year's awards. Nominations are open now through August 27 and can be made on behalf of yourself, your organization, and other influential leaders in the local innovation scene.

The annual awards program recognizes the most innovative individuals and companies in Houston across 10 prestigious categories.

This year's awards will honor the following categories:

  • Minority-founded Business, honoring an innovative startup founded or co-founded by BIPOC or LGBTQ+ representation.
  • Female-founded Business, honoring an innovative startup founded or co-founded by a woman.
  • Energy Transition Business, honoring an innovative startup providing a solution within renewables, climatetech, clean energy, alternative materials, circular economy, and beyond.
  • Health Tech Business, honoring an innovative startup within the health and medical technology sectors.
  • Deep Tech Business, honoring an innovative startup providing technology solutions based on substantial scientific or engineering challenges, including those in the AI, robotics, and space sectors.
  • Startup of the Year (People's Choice), honoring a startup celebrating a recent milestone or success. The winner will be selected by the community via an interactive voting experience.
  • Scaleup of the Year, honoring an innovative later-stage startup that's recently reached a significant milestone in company growth.
  • Incubator/Accelerator of the Year, honoring a local incubator or accelerator that is championing and fueling the growth of Houston startups.
  • Mentor of the Year, honoring an individual who dedicates their time and expertise to guide and support budding entrepreneurs.
  • Trailblazer, honoring an innovator who's made a lasting impact on the Houston innovation community.

You have three weeks to submit nominees, so don't delay — nominate today at this link or fill out the form below. Qualified nominees will receive a formal application to complete, which will be reviewed by our esteemed panel of judges to determine the finalists and winners.

More announcements about the 2026 Houston Innovation Awards are coming soon, including an introduction to this year's panel of judges. Interested in sponsoring the 2026 Houston Innovation Awards? Please contact sales@innovationmap.com.

$5B MD Anderson-anchored Austin medical center to break ground this fall

moving forward

Construction on the $1 billion first phase of the AI-native University of Texas Dell Medical Center in Austin—which will feature a hospital operated by Houston’s UT MD Anderson Cancer Center—is set to start this fall.

The UT System Board of Regents approved funding for first-phase construction on Aug. 12.

The medical center—now expected to cost $5 billion, up from the initial $2.9 billion estimate—will span about 2.5 million square feet. It will include 300 to 500 patient beds, outpatient facilities, an emergency department and specialized care for cancer patients.

MD Anderson will bring its world-renowned oncology programs to the center’s integrated health care model, Dr. Claudia Lucchinetti, senior vice president of medical affairs at UT Austin and dean of the university’s Dell Medical School, tells Health Leaders.

Earlier this year, Austin tech billionaire Michael Dell and his wife, Susan, pledged $750 million for development of the medical center. The medical center, scheduled for completion in December 2030, will be a cornerstone of the new 300-acre UT Dell Campus for Advanced Research, a medical education and research hub.

“Through this new campus and medical center, Texas will lead America in health care innovation,” Gov. Greg Abbott said when the research campus was announced in April. “The next generation of medical breakthroughs will take place in Central Texas.”

The medical center will fold AI tools and other technology into the infrastructure, rather than having them added after it’s built. Among other capabilities, the technology will monitor real-time medical data, automate data entry, and help health care professionals quickly predict and identify risks to patients, according to Health Leaders.

“We are not just building a new medical center,” Lucchinetti says. “We are building a fundamentally new model of health. It’s not just a new facility. It’s not just a new collaboration. It is a convergence of capabilities that rarely come together at the same time.”

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