ION ECOSYSTEM

PROGRAMMING HIGHLIGHTS

→ Family Tech Day

A quarterly series focusing on STEAM concepts, including hands-on activities such as creating models of blood, mini robots, and coding utilizing Arduino kits. Each Family Tech Day reaches close to 75 students along with their families. A range of partners, including STEAM on Demand, SUPERGirls SHINE Foundation, and Eagle Investors have helped put on these quarterly programs.

→ Ion Office Hours

To help entrepreneurs take their next steps, the Ion hosts Office Hours sessions every Friday morning. More than 300 have people received one-on-one consultations to learn about opportunities at the Ion and/or met with representatives of partner organizations including, SCORE, SBA, SBDC, and Liftfund. Baker Botts, Aramco, Ion Prototyping Lab and Houston Methodist also host office hours separately for entrepreneurs.

→ Houston Startup Showcase

Houston Startup Showcase is a “Shark Tank” style pitch competition for startups at various stages to compete and gather feedback from esteemed judges and known Ion mentors. As startups pitch and progress in the competition to semi-finals and finals, they have a chance to win a cash prize. Since 2020, Ion has hosted over 150 pitches, evaluated by over 100 different judges.

TO DATE, ION + PARTNERS

$55,000 given in prizes

$50,000 worth of pro-bono legal support to winners by Baker Botts

In 2023, Ion hosted 3,086 hours of programming

In addition to the Ion team, corporate sponsors, Ion tenants, and strategic partners are among the groups who contributed to the wide array of meetings, events, and programming that allowed startups, investors, academics, and community members, to collaborate on ideas, learn new skills, and begin a journey on commercializing their technology.

NOVEMBER 2023 WINNER: WELLWORTH

Wellworth was co-founded in 2018 after Samra Nawaz identified a gap in financial modeling for the oil and gas industry. Engineering teams work with massive amounts of data that’s too big for Excel, so finance teams then have to work off of aggregated data to build their financial models. Since creating Wellworth with her husband, the company has developed its MVP, completed a few accelerators — Rice University’s OwlSpark, MassChallenge, and Softeq Ventures, to name a few — and most recently won the Ion’s 2023 Houston Startup Showcase competition.

MAY 2023 WINNER: TRAINR

Trainr is an all-in-one software for performance and skills trainers in over 25 sports verticals, as well as provides payments, scheduling, and messaging tools to help trainers maximize their earnings and eliminate wasted time. A minority-owned business, trainr was part of DivInc’s Sports Tech Accelerator last spring.

Jeremy, the founder of trainr, enjoyed Houston and the Ion so much that his family chose to move to Houston from Dallas. When trainr launched their app on Android & iOS, he hosted his product launch celebration at the Ion.