The 23rd annual Energy Tech Venture Forum (ETVF), hosted by the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, welcomed 97 ventures to connect with investors, exchange ideas and explore opportunities for pilots, investment and collaboration.
The participating ventures represented different aspects of the energy tech industry with presentations grouped into robotics and drones, carbon management, grid deployment and modernization, energy storage, critical minerals, advanced materials and manufacturing technologies, renewable energy, fossil energy, building technologies and safety, as well as industrial efficiency. These ventures have already collectively raised more than $1 billion in funding.
“Yesterday during office hours, we had 675 meetings take place between investors and founders, so we look forward to that billion-dollar number continuing to climb and fostering the type of collisions that will help drive the next wave of innovation here in Houston, Texas,” said John “JR” Reale, executive director of Rice Alliance and associate vice president for industry and new ventures at Rice University.
“So, if you are a founder who's building the future, we invite you to be here,” he continued. “We invite you to be part of this community, where we look to take advantage of the core strengths of our community. When you look at what we do so well here in Houston and the decades of compounding around the ability to make things – the manufacturing and fabrication, our ability to power things, the expertise and the capabilities, and our ability to move things. When we think about the logistics and scale that you can drive from anywhere in the nation and across the world, this is the place to solve mission-critical problems that are shaping the physical world. And we continue to look to be a bigger part of the future world economy.”
Houston’s strengths in manufacturing, fabrication, energy, logistics and large-scale infrastructure have positioned the city as a hub for companies developing technologies to address mission-critical challenges in the physical world. As an anchor event and co-founder of the 3rd Annual Houston Energy and Climate Startup Week, the forum plays an important role in fostering connections that can help shape the trajectory of emerging companies and contribute to the next wave of innovation in Houston and beyond.
“If you're thinking about scaling your company, bring it to Houston,” said David Sholl, the executive vice president for research and professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Rice. “We are ready to work with you, and this is a fantastic place to be – Rice is a very, very exciting place to be. We have absolutely top tier research, and so we have our own companies that we're spinning out. We're very pleased to work with a number of partners in the room doing that.”
The region sits at the center of an increasingly complex global energy landscape, where growing demand is colliding with challenges around supply, infrastructure, reliability and shifting trade routes. Opening ETVF, Sean Maher, vice president of investor relations and chief economist at Phillips 66, highlighted technology’s role in meeting future demand through greater efficiency, more reliable infrastructure, new energy sources and lower emissions.
In Houston, that convergence of deep energy expertise and emerging technology is helping create an ecosystem where startups, investors and established energy companies can work together to commercialize solutions for a changing global market. The Rice Alliance Energy Tech Venture Forum reflects that role, bringing energy innovators together with investors and industry leaders to help move technologies from ideas toward real-world deployment.
Of the 97 presenting companies, 10 were selected as the “Most Promising Companies” by the attending investors and one earned the “People’s Choice Award.”
Most Promising Companies:
- Aquafortus
- A deep-tech water company whose non-thermal desalination technology makes treating the world’s toughest brines radically cheaper, unlocking a $100B global market.
- FocisAI
- Uses AI to transform laser scans and reality-capture data into structured facility intelligence, automatically identifying and inventorying physical assets across industrial facilities.
- IronLattice
- Building the next generation of high-performance AI memory.
- Licube
- A deep-tech startup commercializing electrodialysis-based lithium refining to supply ultra-high-purity lithium and enriched lithium isotope products for advanced industrial applications.
- Mars Materials
- A new, carbon-negative and industry-validated domestic route for drop-in carbon fiber.
- MCatalysis
- Fuel without fossils at half the cost of conventional.
- OTee
- The new control layer for industrial AI, built on virtual programmable login controllers.
- Pike Robotics
- A robot maintenance platform that enables hazardous industrial assets to be inspected while remaining online, reducing shutdown costs and worker exposure while generating data for ongoing asset health monitoring.
- UptimeAI
- Move beyond detection to expert decision making with reasoning agents.
- Spiritus
- Makes carbon dioxide on site at oil fields a one-tenth the cost of competitors, unlocking $4.2T of U.S. oil through enhanced oil recovery.
People’s Choice Award:
- Stellai
- Helps industrial waste and recycling operators prevent fires and improve operational control through edge-based AI vision systems deployed directly in existing workflows.
The Rice Alliance, a nationally recognized leader in entrepreneurship and innovation, fosters the creation, growth and success of startups and the commercialization of new technologies in Houston and beyond. Since its founding in 2001, more than 3,500 companies have participated in Rice Alliance programs, collectively raising over $27.8 billion in capital. The Rice Alliance is launching Houston’s Venture Advantage Platform, designed to reduce friction, increase velocity, and turn promising ideas into enduring companies.
Rice Alliance also leads programming and activation at the Ion, Houston’s hub for innovation, which anchors the Ion District, a 16-acre innovation hub in Midtown developed by Rice.
To learn more about Rice Alliance’s entrepreneurship ecosystem and future activities, click here.