*|MC:SUBJECT|*

Dear Friends of Greentown Houston,

It was so great to see many of you at various events throughout Ion Activation Festival Week! What a wonderful lineup of activities that celebrated the progress and momentum of the Ion District, and provided an opportunity to envision the future of what’s to come for this incredible community.

At Greentown, we’ve been reflecting on our first two years in Houston—our growing startup community of 75+ member companies, our supportive partner network that’s growing by the day, and this buzzing ecosystem of brilliant people working together to accelerate the energy transition.

We want our next two years to be just as impactful—if not more—than our first two.

And as many of you heard at Activation Festival last week, we’ve identified our next area of focus, of impact: we’re building a wet lab!

That’s right, our team—in partnership with Ion District, Rice Management Company, and others—is actively drawing the blueprint for what the wet lab will look like and we need your help.

We have experience building a wet lab at our Boston incubator five years ago, but part of what makes Greentown unique is that we build our programs, offerings—heck even our facilities!—based on feedback from our startups, partners, and friends in the ecosystem. So with that, if you’re an entrepreneur or innovator who could benefit from a wet lab, please let us know what you’d like to see in there. What would help advance your technology? What resources would you benefit from?

And if you represent a corporation or supplier that might be interested in supporting our wet lab, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Warmly,
The Greentown Houston Team

Meet Our Newest Members

Eologix’s smart sensor platform allows wind turbine operators to maximize efficiency of operations by monitoring ice and temperature, measuring pitch angle, and more.

Helix Earth Technologies is using technology the team developed at NASA to improve the energy efficiency of air conditioning, as well as revolutionize the industries of carbon capture and storage and pollutant capture. Helix Earth Technologies was the winner of the inaugural TEX-E Prize!

SkyH2O is scaling atmospheric water generation for use in commercial, industrial, and governmental settings.

Do you run or know of a startup that’s interested in joining our community? Learn about what Greentown membership includes here and get in touch!

Member Milestones

Ohmium, a startup making the production of green hydrogen easy and efficient, closed a $250M Series C round that will be used to help grow its international presence.
SmartAC.com raised $22M from local investors to ramp up sales of its HVAC monitoring system.
Ebb Carbon raised a $20M Series A round to deploy its ocean-based CO2 removal systems.
Veloce Energy raised an initial round of Series A funding for its interoperable EV charging stations that simplify the process of connecting to the grid.
Fervo Energy, a geothermal company leveraging proven drilling technologies to improve access to potential energy sources, received a $10M investment from Devon Energy Corporation.
Cemvita opened a pilot plant in Houston for producing an alternative to soybean oil that is made with captured CO2.
Eugenie.ai was highlighted by Google as part of the Google for Startups Accelerator: Climate Change program for its work in using AI to reduce manufacturing emissions.
Ohmium signed an agreement with E4Efficiency to provide green hydrogen as a substitute for methane in E4Efficiency’s regasification terminal in Spain.
CeraPhi Energy entered an agreement with Weatherford to integrate digitalization services into the former’s geothermal technologies.
H2Pro was selected as a winner of the 2023 BloombergNEF Pioneer Award.
Active Surfaces, an ACCEL participant, won $25k at the Rice Business Plan Competition. TEX-E Prize winners and finalists FluxWorks, Tierra Climate, and Pike Robotics also took home awards.

Startup Spotlights

In addition to the challenges associated with decarbonizing asset-heavy industries, carbon data management can become difficult to handle. Planckton Data’s platform empowers companies working toward net-zero by providing interoperable data and rapid insights to guide better decision-making and emissions-reducing action. Learn more about the startup here!

Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) is a ubiquitous material used in a variety of settings; as a synthetic plastic polymer formed by fossil fuels, it is also notably unsustainable and takes hundreds of years to break down in landfills. frakktal, a member of our inaugural ACCEL cohort, has a plan to address this issue, though: using biobased polymers derived from agricultural byproducts as a replacement. Read more here about its solution!

Michael Fletcher and Kristeen Reynolds are bringing their passion for sneaker culture, circularity, and community engagement to the pavement with DrinKicks—a startup turning food waste and recycled materials into shoes with 89 percent lower carbon emissions than their cow-leather counterparts. Read more about what they have in store here!

Mark Your Calendar for These Upcoming Events

May 25: Greentown Houston x BCG Pitch Day
Join us at Greentown Houston for an event with BCG X, featuring our Houston members that are raising pre-seed and seed rounds! There will also be a Fan Favorite prize, sponsored by O’Melveny & Myers, which will consist of in-kind services in the form of five hours of virtual office consulting. Register here!

June 15: Investor Speaker Series: Celebrating Identity in Angel Investing
At this installment of our Investor Speaker Series, we’re celebrating the intersection of Pride Month, Juneteenth, and efforts to create an equitable fundraising landscape, featuring representatives from several angel investing groups that prioritize and celebrate founders’ unique identities. Register here!

June 28: Transition on Tap x The Technology Partnership (TTP)
Join us at Greentown Houston for next month’s Transition On Tap, sponsored by TTP, to network with climatetech entrepreneurs, investors, and more—register here!

Join the Greentown team

Greentown is growing! We're hiring a Manager of Partnerships at our Houston incubator.

Thank You to Our Founding + Grand Opening Partners 🌎

Houston: help us build a wet lab for energy transition innovators

From The Ecosystem

Houston: help us build a wet lab for energy transition innovators