The 2023 Houston Innovation Awards celebrated Houston's tech and entrepreneurship community. Photo by Emily Jaschke/InnovationMap

That's a wrap on the 2023 Houston Innovation Awards — and boy did the event deliver on networking, award wins, and plenty of celebrating Houston's tech and entrepreneurship community.

With a crowd of around 600 attendees, the Houston Innovation Awards, which took place on November 8 at Silver Street Studios in partnership with Houston Exponential, celebrated over 50 finalists and a dozen winners across categories. Click here to see who won an award.

Learn more about this year's honorees in InnovationMap's the editorial series:

See below for photos from the event.

The 2023 Houston Innovation Awards took place on Nov. 8.

Photo by Emily Jaschke/InnovationMap

Brad Burke has been named the 2023 Trailblazer Award recipient. Photo via alliance.rice.edu

Houston Innovation Awards names longtime Rice leader as 2023 Trailblazer

leading innovation

In less than a month, all of Houston's innovation community's movers and shakers will gather to celebrate the Houston Innovation Awards, and the night's first honoree has officially been named.

Brad Burke, managing director of the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, was selected to receive the 2023 Trailblazer Award. The award was established to recognize an individual who has already left a profound impact on Houston's business and innovation ecosystem and is dedicated to continuing to support Houston and its entrepreneurs.

The award, which is selected from a group of internal and external nominations, was decided by a vote of the 2023 awards judges, who represent Houston's business, investment, and entrepreneurial community across industries. Last year, Blair Garrou, managing director and founder of Houston-based venture capital firm Mercury, accepted the award, and the inaugural recipient in 2021 was Barbara Burger, former president of Chevron Technology Ventures.

Founded in 2000, the Rice Alliance has been led by Burke since its early days, and its impact had far exceeded the Rice University campus. The organization's cornerstone event, the Rice Business Plan Competition, attracts hundreds of student entrepreneurs, venture investors, and more to Houston every spring.

In a Q&A with InnovationMap, Burke discusses his passion for Houston and the impact he and the Rice Alliance have made on the city.

InnovationMap: ​From the Rice Business Plan Competition to the many venture days and other programing, how would you describe the Rice Alliance's impact — under your leadership for the past more than 20 years — on the Houston innovation ecosystem?

Brad Burke: From the earliest days of the Rice Alliance in 2000, our goal has been to create a community to support the launch of tech startups in Houston and bring together the resources to enable them to be successful, whether they need entrepreneurship education, mentoring, funding, legal support, opportunities for pilots, or connections. It’s been really important for us to bridge a connection between Rice University and the Houston ecosystem—so we’ve been intentional about driving our impact outside of the hedges and I always envision Rice to be a hub for entrepreneurial ecosystem and a pillar in the Houston community.

Through the Rice Business Plan Competition, our venture forums, accelerators, educational workshops, and other programs, we have coalesced hundreds, if not thousands, of investors, mentors, corporates, service providers, who collaborate with a shared goal of making Houston a leading region for entrepreneurship. The RBPC alone now has more than 350 investors and other judges and has resulted in the formation of several new investment groups including, Goose Capital, Owl Investment Group, and nCourage Entrepreneurs. We’ve also aimed to shine a light on Houston outside of the city. That’s why we’ve built global programs to bring entrepreneurs and investors here to see just how great we all know the Houston community to be. The growth of RBPC into the “world’s largest and richest student startup competition” is not just a result of the Rice Alliance, but it’s really a result of the Houston community members who have been dedicated with us for so long. We hope this is a point of pride and feels like a win for everyone in Houston, not just the Rice Alliance.
 
Based on our research we know that more than 3,165 startups have participated in our programs and raised more than $23 billion in funding.

IM: Rice University is an integral part of the Houston business and innovation community. Why are you and other university leaders committed to supporting entrepreneurship in Houston on and off the Rice campus?

BB: When you look across the country, in every leading region of entrepreneurship and venture capital, strong research universities played a major role as a catalyst for driving success, such as Stanford and Berkeley in Silicon Valley and MIT and Harvard in Boston. For Houston to succeed, it is important to Rice to play a similar leadership role. A key part of our mission is to help commercialize technologies developed by the incredibly talented faculty at Rice as well as other institutions in the region. But it is also to help entrepreneurs who may have no affiliation with Rice, as well as bring some of the most promising startups from other regions to Houston to meet with local investors and to encourage them to build their companies here. At the same time, we bring hundreds of investors to Houston each year from other parts of the U.S. and organize hundreds of one-on-one meetings with regional startups. By fostering and building the entrepreneurial ecosystem, we foster economic development and job creation in Houston, and can help ensure Houston remains the energy capital of the world and a global leader in healthcare and life sciences, building on the work of the Texas Medical Center.

IM: Looking back on your career so far, as well as to the future, what do you hope your legacy is?

Our philosophy has been to be supportive of and collaborative with every organization in Houston. We all share a common goal to make Houston a leading entrepreneurship region. In order to achieve this goal, it takes a collaborative effort. We have strived to serve as a role model in Houston to achieve this success. In everything we’ve built over the past 22 years at Rice Alliance, we’ve prioritized building relationships and collaborations, bringing people in, so that it’s not just the Rice Alliance’s success but Houston’s success and that when I think about legacy, that mindset and that approach is part of that.

As I look back, it feels like the trajectory of Houston’s entrepreneurial ecosystem has reached an inflection point over the past several years. As I meet with leaders from around the country, they are all familiar with the success of the Rice Business Plan Competition, and increasingly view Houston as a major player in energy innovation and the energy transition. I would hope that the Rice Alliance is viewed as one of the organizations that contributed substantially to this success and has played a key role as a catalyst in the ecosystem. I hope that the success of the Rice Alliance has spurred additional support for the ecosystem, such as Rice’s investment in the Ion and the Ion Innovation District.

But I hope the legacy will extend beyond Houston, as we were a co-founder of the Texas University Network for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (TUNIE), along with UT Dallas, in order to help every university in the state of Texas enhance its entrepreneurship program. And we are the headquarters for Global Consortium of Entrepreneurship Centers (GCEC) which brings together over 300 universities each year to network and share best practices. Both organizations reflect positively on Rice and the Houston ecosystem.

Most of all, I recognize that whatever we have accomplished has been due to the amazing team members that comprise the Rice Alliance. It is without a doubt the best group of people I have ever worked with in my career.

I’m proud of the relationships and collaborations we have formed at all levels: within our Rice Alliance team, with the RBPC and many judges and the formation of new investor groups, the formation of TUNIE and relationships with universities within Texas, and leadership of the GCEC, a collaboration of other universities across the U.S. and the world.

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Join InnovationMap and Houston Exponential in celebrating Brad Burke and the other honorees — who will be announced next week — at the November 8 event.


The InnovationMap Awards will celebrate Barbara Burger, vice president of innovation at Chevron and president of Chevron Technology Ventures, as this year's Trailblazer Award honoree. Courtesy of CTV

InnovationMap names inaugural Trailblazer Award recipient

honoring innovation

The inaugural InnovationMap Awards event, which is about three weeks away, was created to honor the best of Houston innovation. The Trailblazer Award in particular was established to honor a Houston innovation leader and advocate who's making a lasting impact on the Houston innovation community.

Barbara Burger, vice president of innovation at Chevron and president of Chevron Technology Ventures, was selected to receive the 2021 Trailblazer Award at the InnovationMap Awards presented by Techwave. Burger was nominated and approved by this year's judges.

Grace Rodriguez, CEO and executive director of Impact Hub Houston and a 2021 InnovationMap Awards judge, says Burger is a pioneer of bringing people together and was instrumental in the launch of Station Houston, as well as in the development of Houston Exponential and Houston's Innovation Corridor.

"In the startup world, we often talk about unicorns as simply companies valued at over a billion dollars. But Barbara is a TRUE unicorn," Rodriguez says. "Barbara's breadth of interests, from the arts to the sciences to business and innovation, coupled with her depth of insight gleaned from years of real-world experience in strategic advising in all of those areas, have been invaluable to Houston's innovation ecosystem."

Burger, who is the current board chair at HX, says she's seen Houston's innovation ecosystem evolve in her tenure in Houston, from watching venture capital investment grow and the Innovation District develop to new organizations — such as Greentown Labs and MassChallenge — flock to Houston.

"I am deeply honored to be recognized for my contributions to the Houston Innovation Ecosystem. I moved to Houston in 2013 and in short order was included and saw ways I could contribute. That is a great welcome! While I am proud of my contributions and our progress, we are just getting started," Burger says.

Burger leads Chevron's corporate venture arm, Chevron Technology Ventures, which has invested millions in the future of energy technology. This type of corporate venture activity — especially in a city with so many Fortune 500 companies — plays a key role in an innovation community.

"I have been a part of building a community that is focused on the future," she says. "The community includes all kinds of organizations in Houston – from city to academics to start-ups to investors to corporations – and community creates the connective tissue that shows us that working together we can accomplish great things."

Burger will be honored at the InnovationMap Awards event on September 8. The hybrid event will host finalists and their guests at The Cannon, while also feature a livestream feed for everyone to join virtually. Click here to RSVP.

"I'm grateful to call her an ally, mentor, and friend," Rodriguez continues. "She is truly deserving of this and every honor bestowed upon her. And I can't wait to see what new and exciting ideas she helps bring to life in the decades ahead."

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Houston startups win NASA funding for space tech projects

fresh funding

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.

Houston energy tech startup Molecule closes series B funding round

Big Bang

Houston-based energy trading risk management (ETRM) software company Molecule has completed a successful series B round for an undisclosed amount, according to a July 16 release from the company.

The raise was led by Sundance Growth, a California-based software growth equity firm.

Sameer Soleja, founder and CEO of Molecule, said in the release that the funding will allow the company to "double down on product innovation, grow our team, and reach even more markets."

Molecule closed a $12 million Series A round in 2021, led by Houston-based Mercury Fund, and has since seen significant growth. The company, which was founded in 2012, has expanded its customer base across the U.S., U.K., Europe, Canada and South America, according to the release.

Additionally, it has launched two new modules of its software platform. Its Hive module, which debuted in 2022, enables clients to manage their energy portfolio and renewable credits together in one scalable platform. It also introduced Elektra, an add-on for the power market to its platform, which allows for complex power market trading.

"Four years ago, we committed to becoming the leading platform for energy trading," Soleja said in the release. "Today, our customers are managing complex power and renewable portfolios across multiple jurisdictions, all within Molecule.”

Molecule is also known for its data-as-a-lake platform, Bigbang, which enables energy ETRM and commodities trading and risk management (CTRM) customers to automatically import trade data from Molecule and then merge it with various sources to conduct queries and analysis.

“Molecule is doing something very few companies in energy tech have done: combining mission-critical depth with cloud-native, scalable technology,” Christian Stewart, Sundance Growth managing director, added in the statement.

“Sameer and his team have built a platform that’s not only powerful, but user-friendly—a rare combination in enterprise software. We’re thrilled to partner with Molecule as they continue to grow and transform the energy trading and risk management market.”

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This article originally appeared on EnergyCapitalHTX.com.

Rice University professor earns $550k NSF award for wearable imaging tech​

science supported

Another Houston scientist has won one of the highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Awards.

Lei Li, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University, has received a $550,000, five-year grant to develop wearable, hospital-grade medical imaging technology capable of visualizing deep tissue function in real-time, according to the NSF. The CAREER grants are given to "early career faculty members who demonstrate the potential to serve as academic models and leaders in research and education."

“This is about giving people access to powerful diagnostic tools that were once confined to hospitals,” Li said in a news release from Rice. “If we can make imaging affordable, wearable and continuous, we can catch disease earlier and treat it more effectively.”

Li’s research focuses on photoacoustic imaging, which merges light and sound to produce high-resolution images of structures deep inside the body. It relies on pulses of laser light that are absorbed by tissue, leading to a rapid temperature rise. During this process, the heat causes the tissue to expand by a fraction, generating ultrasound waves that travel back to the surface and are detected and converted into an image. The process is known to yield more detailed images without dyes or contrast agents used in some traditional ultrasounds.

However, current photoacoustic systems tend to use a variety of sensors, making them bulky, expensive and impractical. Li and his team are taking a different approach.

Instead of using hundreds of separate sensors, Li and his researchers are developing a method that allows a single sensor to capture the same information via a specially designed encoder. The encoder assigns a unique spatiotemporal signature to each incoming sound wave. A reconstruction algorithm then interprets and decodes the signals.

These advances have the potential to lower the size, cost and power consumption of imaging systems. The researchers believe the device could be used in telemedicine, remote diagnostics and real-time disease monitoring. Li’s lab will also collaborate with clinicians to explore how the miniaturized technology could help monitor cancer treatment and other conditions.

“Reducing the number of detection channels from hundreds to one could shrink these devices from bench-top systems into compact, energy-efficient wearables,” Li said in the release. “That opens the door to continuous health monitoring in daily life—not just in hospitals.”

Amanda Marciel, the William Marsh Rice Trustee Chair of chemical and biomolecular engineering and an assistant professor at Rice, received an NSF CAREER Award last year. Read more here.