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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CultureMap Emails are Awesome

Axiom Space launches semiconductor and astronaut training initiatives

space projects

Axiom Space, a Houston-based commercial spaceflight and space infrastructure company, has launched initiatives in two very different spheres — semiconductors and astronaut training.

On the semiconductor front, Axiom has signed a memorandum of understanding with Japanese chemical company Resonac Corp. to collaborate on semiconductor R&D and manufacturing projects carried out in space. Among Resonac’s products are materials used in chip manufacturing.

Axiom said the deal “paves the way toward leveraging microgravity to advance next-generation chip technologies and accelerate the in-space manufacturing market.”

Under the agreement, Axiom and Resonac will explore the potential production of semiconductor materials and chip packaging in microgravity and low-Earth-orbit environments.

“The unique environment of space offers immense potential for advancing semiconductor materials, especially in crystal growth,” Masato Fukushima, Resonac’s chief technology officer, said in a news release.

The deal will also extend Resonac’s work with Axiom on the development of molding compounds that can reduce “soft errors” when semiconductor devices are exposed to space radiation.

“Our collaboration with Resonac underscores how Axiom Space is enabling global corporations from around the world to leverage space to drive manufacturing innovation across critical technology sectors such as semiconductors,” Axiom astronaut Koichi Wakata, the company’s chief technology officer, said.

In the astronaut training arena, Axiom has tapped Portuguese physiologist Emiliano Ventura as its first “Project Astronaut.” Ventura will apply his expertise in human performance to a pilot program aimed at testing six-month astronaut training protocols.

“His goal is to participate in a future mission and explore, with scientific depth and curiosity, how the human body adapts to microgravity, contributing fresh insights to the current body of research in space physiology,” Axiom said.

Ventura has helped several Axiom crewmembers with physiological needs before and after missions aboard the International Space Station.

Axiom said Ventura’s pilot program will study astronauts’ physiological responses to microgravity during spaceflight. The program eventually will benefit Axiom astronauts heading to the world’s first commercial space station, which is being built by Axiom.

Michael López-Alegria, Axiom’s chief astronaut, said he and the company’s two other astronauts will train with Ventura. The Project Astronaut initiative “strengthens our commitment to enabling safe, effective, and inspiring commercial space missions while supporting scientific objectives worldwide.” López-Alegria said.

Houston scientist launches new app to support mental health professionals

App for that

One Houston-based mental health scientist is launching a new app-based approach to continuing education that she hopes will change the way doctors, therapists, and social workers evolve in their field.

The app, MHNTI, is named for its parent company, the Mental Health Network & Training Institute. It's a one-stop shop for mental health professionals to find trainers, expert consultations, local providers, webinars, and other tools related to licensure certification and renewal.

Free and paid tiers offer different levels of access, but both offer doctors, counselors, and more an easier way to engage with continuing education. When a mental health professional is looking to expand their knowledge in a way that coincides with CE requirements, MHNTI provides it; as easy as using Amazon.

"We built MHNTI for the clinicians craving meaningful, ongoing training that fits real-life schedules," said Dr. Elizabeth McIngvale. "MHNTI is more than an app. It's a movement to support mental health professionals at every career stage."

McIngvale, the daughter of celebrated Houston entrepreneur Jim "Mattress Mack" McIngvale, co-founded MHNTI after becoming one of the leading experts on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) in the United States. Born with the condition herself, she suffered greatly as a child to the point that she required extensive repetitive rituals daily just to function. She responded to exposure with response prevention (ERP) treatment, earned her Ph.D. from the University of Houston, and is now the director at the OCD Institute of Texas.

This is not the first time she used the internet to try to improve the mental health industry. In 2018, she launched the OCD Challenge website, a free resource for people with OCD.

McIngvale's co-founder is New York-based doctor, entrepreneur, and author Lauren Wadsworth, another expert in OCD and other anxiety disorders. Like McIngvale, she understands that the labyrinthian world of continuing education can keep mental health professionals from achieving their potential.

"Mental health providers are often overworked and under-resourced. MHNTI is here to change that," said Wadsworth. "We're creating a space where clinicians can continuously learn, grow, and feel supported by experts who understand the work firsthand."

MHNTI is available in the App Store, Google Play, and for desktop.

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A version of this article originally appeared on CultureMap.com.

Announcing the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards finalists

Inspirational Innovators

InnovationMap is proud to reveal the finalists for the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards.

Taking place on November 13 at Greentown Labs, the fifth annual Houston Innovation Awards will honor the best of Houston's innovation ecosystem, including startups, entrepreneurs, mentors, and more.

This year's finalists were determined by our esteemed panel of judges, comprised of past award winners and InnovationMap editorial leadership.

The panel reviewed nominee applications across 10 prestigious categories to determine our finalists. They will select the winner for each category, except for Startup of the Year, which will be chosen by the public via online voting launching later this month.

We'll announce our 2025 Trailblazer Award recipient in the coming weeks, and then we'll unveil the rest of this year's winners live at our awards ceremony.

Get to know all of our finalists in more detail through editorial spotlights leading up to the big event. Then, join us on November 13 as we unveil the winners and celebrate all things Houston innovation. Tickets are on sale now — secure yours today.

Without further ado, here are the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards finalists:

Minority-founded Business

Honoring an innovative startup founded or co-founded by BIPOC or LGBTQ+ representation:

  • Capwell Services
  • Deep Anchor Solutions
  • Mars Materials
  • Torres Orbital Mining (TOM)
  • Wellysis USA

Female-founded Business

Honoring an innovative startup founded or co-founded by a woman:

  • Anning Corporation
  • Bairitone Health
  • Brain Haven
  • FlowCare
  • March Biosciences
  • TrialClinIQ

Energy Transition Business

Honoring an innovative startup providing a solution within renewables, climatetech, clean energy, alternative materials, circular economy and beyond:

  • Anning Corporation
  • Capwell Services
  • Deep Anchor Solutions
  • Eclipse Energy
  • Loop Bioproducts
  • Mars Materials
  • Solidec

Health Tech Business

Honoring an innovative startup within the health and medical technology sectors:

  • Bairitone Health
  • Corveus Medical
  • FibroBiologics
  • Koda Health
  • NanoEar
  • Wellysis USA

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:

  • ARIX Technologies
  • Little Place Labs
  • Newfound Materials
  • Paladin Drones
  • Persona AI
  • Tempest Droneworx

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 online voting experience:

  • Eclipse Energy
  • FlowCare
  • MyoStep
  • Persona AI
  • Rheom Materials
  • Solidec

Scaleup of the Year

Honoring an innovative later-stage startup that's recently reached a significant milestone in company growth:

  • Coya Therapeutics
  • Fervo Energy
  • Koda Health
  • Mati Carbon
  • Molecule
  • Utility Global

Incubator/Accelerator of the Year

Honoring a local incubator or accelerator that is championing and fueling the growth of Houston startups:

  • Activate
  • Energy Tech Nexus
  • Greentown Labs
  • Healthtech Accelerator (TMCi)
  • Impact Hub Houston

Mentor of the Year

Honoring an individual who dedicates their time and expertise to guide and support budding entrepreneurs. Presented by Houston Community College:

  • Anil Shetty, Inform AI
  • Jason Ethier, EnergyTech Nexus
  • Jeremy Pitts, Activate
  • Joe Alapat, Liongard
  • Neal Dikeman, Energy Transition Ventures
  • Nisha Desai, Intention

Trailblazer Recipient

  • To be announced
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Interested in sponsoring the 2025 Houston Innovation Awards? Contact sales@innovationmap.com for details.