A new cohort of Houston-area startups marks the debut of a national nonprofit accelerator’s first foray into the Bayou City.
Activate Global Inc. opened applications for its first-ever Houston fellowship cohort in 2023, and 11 founders have been selected for Cohort 2024:
- Alec Ajnsztajn, founder and CEO of Coflux Purification, a company developing a reactor to destroy "forever chemicals" in the environment. Ajnsztajn also co-founded the Fair for Houston ballot campaign that helped pass Proposition B in the city of Houston last year.
- Rodrigo Alvarez-Icaza Rivera, founder and CEO of Elysium Robotics, a company building actuators for the development of new robots.
- Gabriel Cossio, founder and CEO of Nanoscale Labs, which is developing a process for manufacturing incredibly small devices, or "nanodevices."
- Morann Sonia Dagan, founder of Atolla Tech, which is designing methods to measure the activity of pollinators such as bees.
- Ryan DuChanois and Yang Xia, co-founders of Solidec, which manufactures chemicals and fuels with air, water and renewable energy. Solidec won a prize at a pitch competition hosted at CERAWeek by S&P Global earlier this year.
- Blake Herren, CEO and co-founder of Raven Space Systems, which uses 3D printing to manufacture composite parts for spacecraft.
- Matthew McDermott, founder and CEO of Refound Materials, a company developing chemical recipes to produce key materials for batteries and solar cells.
- Krish Mehta, founder and CEO of Phoenix Materials, a company that aims to decarbonize concrete production using industrial waste.
- Wei Meng, founder and CEO of LumiStrain, which is developing a product to accurately sense strains on critical infrastructure like bridges.
- Meagan Pitcher, founder and CEO of Bairitone, a startup bringing advanced imaging diagnostics into the home.
Along with the new Houston announcement, Activate’s other locations in Berkeley, California; Boston; and New York also named cohorts. The nonprofit also has a cohort named Activate Anywhere for founders who do not live in any of the accelerator’s usual locations. Together, 62 fellows were selected from over 1,000 applicants.
Activate announced its expansion to Houston in March 2023, funded by a $20 million commitment from the National Science Foundation.
At the time of its announcement, the nonprofit said it would be focusing on “hard” technology, which targets industry-specific solutions, along with Houston’s energy transition sectors.
Jeremy Pitts, who co-founded climate technology incubator Greentown Labs in Somerville, Massachusetts, over a decade ago, was brought on as Activate’s Houston managing director last year.
“I have gotten to know these 11 innovators extremely well over the selection process and through our first few weeks of working together,” Pitts wrote in a July 1 LinkedIn post announcing the Houston cohort. “They are an incredible group of passionate entrepreneurs with breakthrough technologies who are poised to leave their mark on the world.”
The Houston Business Journal reached out to Activate for further comments on what future applicants can do to prepare for the next round of fellowships but did not receive a response before press time. Applications for Cohort 2025 open in September, according to Activate’s website.
Other local investors are taking a look at Houston’s hard tech scene after the successes of various corporate-backed startups, such as Syzygy Plasmonics and Cemvita. Both were backed by major industrial corporations with Houston presences — Syzygy by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries and Cemvita by Occidental Petroleum Corp. (NYSE: OXY) — and both have turned their technology into business agreements within the past year.
However, hard tech demands technological expertise at a level many early-stage startups don’t possess. Houston-based entrepreneurs Paul Sheng and Eric Bielke stepped in to help fill that gap earlier this year through the launch of their venture capital fund, Fathom Fund, which boasts over $100 million in capital investments.
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