The University of Houston Technology Bridge's Innov8 Hub founders and people who helped with the event pose with each other at the end of the night. From left to right and back row to front are Onyebuchi Ononogbu, Seth Smith, Byron Freelon, Victoria Mgbemena, Alexander Statsyuk, Nivedita Dutta, Armando Julien, Logan Smalley, Tanu Chatterji and Mai Tran.
A little more than a week prior to the University of Houston Technology Bridge’s seventh Innov8 Hub Startup Pitch Day competition, eight innovators representing six businesses stood before their peers to practice pitching their ideas.
The mock pitch day on Dec. 5 resembled the actual event — sans judges, potential investors, media and an audience. Still, the stress of presenting these ideas within a five-minute timeframe, along with the accompanying challenges and opportunities, is a heavy weight.
In fact, the practice run may have been more intimidating than the competition, which took place Dec. 15 at the University of Houston Innovation Center. Following each presentation, the competitors were confronted with strong feedback from Tanu Chatterji, director of startup development and the UH Tech Bridge Incubator, the Innov8 Hub coaching team and fellow innovators.
“This program has grown exponentially over the past few years. Now we’re really becoming part of Houston’s startup ecosystem.”
—Tanu Chatterji, director of startup development and the UH Tech Bridge Incubator, University of Houston
“These practice runs are an opportunity for our founders to nail down their pitches. We use this time to refine everything from their ideas to their presentations because we want each of these startups to succeed,” Chatterji said. “This program has grown exponentially over the past few years. Now we’re really becoming part of Houston’s startup ecosystem.”
But while some of the critiques could seem ruthless, none of the entrepreneurs were fazed or offended. Instead, they listened closely, jotted down notes and returned to their seats to refine their pitches.
It brought new perspective to the phrase: It’s not personal, it’s just business. If anything, the dry run showcased camaraderie between the founders, as well as gave insight into just how difficult it is to start a business and secure investors.
In some cases, Chatterji suggested the innovators meet with the coaches for focused refinement in the days leading up to the event, while others were advised to simply clean up their PowerPoint slides.
And while the buildup to the event was a lot of work, it was well worth the effort when you’re vying for the attention of investors who could make these startup dreams a reality.
The panel of judges and members of the Innov8 Hub development team from left to right and back row to front are Todd Litton, Ashok Gowda, Ramanan Krishnamoorthi, Tanu Chatterji, Chris Howard, Haleh Ardebili, Kelly Mc Cormick and Mai Tran.
“We’re starting to see the successes of the efforts from the first six cohorts. We’re on the right track and the trajectory is at an inflection point,” said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, vice president of energy and innovation at UH. “The goal is to make this less of a secret; we want to build more partnerships. We have the obligation to prepare this idea of creating new science and technologies and bringing it into the real world.”
What is Innov8 Hub?
Innov8 Hub is a founder-driven series of accelerator programs for early-stage startups led by UH Tech Bridge in partnership with the UH Small Business Development Center.
Each cohort features six to eight aspiring entrepreneurs who want to explore bringing their ideas to market. So far, the program has helped 68 founders since fall 2023.
Innov8 Hub uses methodology designed by another partner, the Wendy Kennedy Institute, that provides a user-friendly framework to help founders determine and communicate a clear and compelling value proposition for their idea.
“This program has been a gamechanger for our founders, as many of them have been able to take their ideas to market,” Chatterji said.
At the end of the three-month program, each founder has the opportunity to showcase their work in front of the innovation community, including potential partners and investors, at Startup Pitch Day.
This year, eight investors representing six companies vied for the top prize of $2,000 and six months of free lab and office space, which was taken by Seth Smith, CEO of Clinano and a senior at UH. Second place went to Onyebuchi J. Ononogbu, CEO at Redeem Care Pro and an assistant professor at UH’s College of Pharmacy, who received $1,000 and six months of free lab and office space.
Meet the Founders
Seth Smith, Clinano Kidney Technologies
Clinano Kidney Technologies wants to improve urine diagnostics by use of an at-home diagnostics and screening program. The idea is to use color-changing nanoparticle chemistry and AI vision analysis to transform the smartphone camera into a clinical-grade medical device for at-home testing, which will bridge the gap in kidney disease screening accessibility.
What inspired your startup? My closest friend from high school is a nurse for Houston Methodist and we meet for lunch regularly. I was wrapping up a previous research project and wanted my next project to be something with real impact potential in health care. When talking to him, the lack of efficient kidney function screening tools both in hospitals and for monitoring patients came up repeatedly. So, I decided to focus my time on inventing new ways to more efficiently address that problem than the current solutions.
What impact do you envision your idea making? Kidney disease is a major health problem across the world. More than 111 million Americans are at risk for the disease and when physicians fail to catch it early, that causes patients to either need weekly dialysis for the rest of their life or be put on an impossibly long kidney transplant list. Our goal is to empower physicians, care organizations and patients with a highly accessible tool for at-home kidney disease screening and kidney function monitoring, allowing patients to get intervention early and giving doctors the data needed to improve health care outcomes.
What was the most important lesson learned in crafting your pitch? A pitch isn’t necessarily about having the best idea or the best team but creating a story that aligns with the listeners’ understanding of the world, introduces your work as something exciting while plausible and creates a compelling call to action.
Onyebuchi J. Ononogbu, Redeem Care Pro
Redeem Care Pro is a digital health platform that empowers patients to report their experiences using AI-guided conversations, which will transform real-time insights into data-driven care. The startup provides pharmaceutical companies, research institutions and payors with access to diverse, patient-reported data that improves health outcomes.
What inspired your startup? Redeem Care Pro was inspired by the painful gap I witnessed every day as a clinical pharmacist caring for sickle cell and hematology patients: We were treating diseases without truly seeing the bigger picture. I saw patients in crisis, in pain or struggling emotionally, yet their lived experiences were rarely captured in a structured, measurable way. If patients’ voices are not systematically captured, their outcomes — and sometimes their lives — are at risk.
What impact do you envision your idea making? Redeem Care Pro has the potential to fundamentally reshape how health systems, payers, pharma and researchers leverage patient-reported outcomes by bringing the patient voice to the center of care. For patients, the platform increases the accuracy of clinical assessments, improves recognition of pain, mental health and quality of life, and helps reduce long-standing disparities in health care. For clinicians, it streamlines workflow by automating Pro intake, providing structured and longitudinal insights to guide decision-making and closing critical communication gaps.
What was the most important lesson learned crafting your pitch? The most important lesson I learned was that clarity beats complexity. As a clinician and researcher, my instinct was to explain every detail, every validation instrument, clinical nuance and technical capability, but crafting the pitch taught me that investors invest in the problem, vision and team, not the minutiae.
Nivedita Dutta & Quentin Vicens, RNAfrnd
RNAfrnd is developing an all-in-one, AI-driven platform looking to achieve efficiency in the prediction and analyses of complex RNA structures. Accurate RNA modeling and design is the current bottleneck for drug discovery because RNA targets are central to several diseases, such as cancer and viral infections. RNAfriend plans to overcome this by using web-based technology to accelerate the design of next-generation nucleic acid therapeutics.
What inspired your startup? A coming together of a vision for enhancing RNA therapeutics, as well as talent, with Nivedita and the team she has managed around this project.
What impact do you envision your idea making? We are really aiming to bring advanced RNA structure prediction and design tools to everyone. We have many tools for working with RNA, but it’s like with computers or the internet when they were invented: they were only available to a few. So, we are similarly bringing advanced tech applied to RNA design to everyone.
What challenges have you faced in pursuing this idea? We’re both academics, and so the challenges have been to understand how the business world works and how one becomes an entrepreneur. Thankfully, we have the fantastic Office of Tech Transfer and Innovation team, which has supported us from first discussions about IP, and that took us then to take their I2F class which culminated in this pitch event.
Armando Julien, Thalor Dynamics
Thalor Dynamics hopes to improve coastal defense, port security and offshore energy by providing these entities ThalorOS, a dual-domain platform that fuses sensors, cameras AIS/Radar and ENCs into an AI-driven tactical picture. The idea is to implement ThalorOS with autonomous vessels to provide users a clearer picture of the underwater world they’re exploring.
What inspired your startup? The rapid shift toward maritime systems is exciting. We’re asking robots to operate in one of the harshest, least forgiving environments on Earth. But working as a vessel traffic specialist for the U.S. Coast Guard, I saw firsthand how even experienced mariners can face confusion, blind spots and split-second decision challenges. I started this company because I saw a clear need: Give people a way to see and trust what autonomy is doing in real-time.
What impact do you envision your idea making? I think we’re going to make autonomy easier for people to work with. If operators can clearly understand what a system is sensing and why it’s acting a certain way, everything becomes safer, faster and more reliable, whether it’s defense, ports or offshore robotics.
What was the most important lesson learned in crafting your pitch? That a pitch isn’t meant to explain the entire scope of the technology, it’s meant to help the audience understand why the problem matters and why the solution is worth building. The practice sessions helped me shift from speaking in operator language to explaining things in a way anyone can follow. Keeping things simple actually made the story stronger.
Victoria Mgbemena & Alexander Statsyuk, CovimBio Inc.
CovimBio Inc. is a platform that looks to rapidly discover, optimize and produce covalent biologic drugs, which are 99% more efficient at tissue penetration and requires less frequent injections. The platform has already been used to develop two representative drug-led programs that treat autoinflammatory diseases.
What inspired your startup? Our startup was inspired by the original curiosity-driven chemistry research in the Statsyuk lab. We subsequently realized we can translate our discovery into useful technology to produce drugs to treat human diseases. Dr. Mgbemena was instrumental in defining which initial therapeutic areas we should focus on, which was autoinflammatory diseases.
What impact do you envision your idea making? We envision that our technology will substantially reduce the cost of drug manufacturing, increase drug efficacy and reduce side effects by minimizing the exposure of normal tissues to the drug, while maximizing the exposure of disease tissues to the drug.
What was the most important lesson learned in crafting your pitch? The most important lesson was that identifying and conveying a clear problem we are trying to solve is difficult. Also, we had to learn how to think about our idea from a business perspective. We had to identify potential customers, think about details like costs for each milestone and more. It was challenging for us to go from the academic mindset to the business mindset.