Tech Startup Finds Success by Leveraging Partnerships

TECH GOALS: Co-founder & CEO of SlideX, Anthony Brock, discusses technology and innovation goals with Mayor Sylvester Turner at last year’s ribbon cutting ceremony for Station Houston’s Ion Smart Cities Accelerator office. To learn more about SlideX, go to slidex.io. *Photo was taken pre-COVID.

By: Angel Rodriguez

In a city known for giant leaps, Houstonarea small businesses and startups have recently seen a revitalization that has allowed for significant strides toward innovation in the medical, energy, and aerospace industries. One of the driving forces of this resurgence is Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Smart City Initiative, designed to boost the city’s resilience and bring it into the next phase of innovation.

Also poised to jumpstart this innovation renaissance is The Ion, a business and technology consortium purposed for creating opportunities for economic growth and resiliency. Through partnerships with the City of Houston, Microsoft, and Intel, The Ion has built a launchpad for what is to be Houston’s innovation hub.

The Ion Smart and Resilient Cities Accelerator (ISRCA) supports start-ups with pioneering ideas and technology innovation for smart city solutions. One startup that has benefited from the ISRCA is SlideX, a parking management company that developed a dynamic parking system app which tracks vehicles in real-time.

Founder Anthony Brock and co-founder Yves Koulidiati developed this app out of a need for more efficient, secure, and eco-friendly parking systems to service valets, high-rise parking garages, and high-capacity facilities. The app reduces the time drivers spend looking for parking, tracks unauthorized vehicles, and provides ticketless technology, which reduces emissions and wasteful paper usage. SlideX accessed Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR), a federal research and development program, and The Ion to collaborate with NASA to advance their app technology.

Through this Technology Transfer Program partnership, SlideX gained the opportunity to conceptualize an intelligent parking system for their space program and ultimately, commercial usage with NASA engineers, and to experiment using NASA technology. Currently, SlideX and NASA have partnered to create the fastest and most efficient parking system on the market with the hope of utilizing the system for tracking vehicles on an interplanetary level during Mars exploration missions.

Brock and Koulidiati advise that companies who are interested in working with entities like NASA should log on to the SBIR website and research the advertised proposals.

“It will make navigating these large institutions much easier,” Brock said.

SlideX also cited their participation in the Microsoft for Start-Ups program as being a catalyst for their growth. Through The Ion, Microsoft for Startups partners with companies and assigns them a marketing team to develop their products for the marketplace. The program also allows companies to use the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform to build their infrastructure and applications at no cost. Free access to this type of technology cuts down on costly overhead that start-ups might not be able to sustain. For more information, visit www.ionhouston.com/accelerators/.

Resources for Tech Startups

The Ion offers the following:

Baker Botts Office Hours: Free 30-minute consultations for legal needs related to your business.

How to Start a Startup: Identify problems, needs, and trends worth pursuing and evaluate possible solutions to these problems.

For times, dates and registration, visit www.ionhouston.com/events-andprograms/.