houston-startup
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Shreyans Chopra
Shreyans Chopra is the founder and CEO of Mstack, an AI-native specialty chemicals company based in Houston that helps North American and global buyers source custom chemicals from a diversified manufacturing network. A chartered accountant turned BCG consultant turned Lightspeed India investor, he started Mstack in July 2022 and scaled it to more than 100 enterprise customers and operational profitability, raising a $40 million Series A led by Lightspeed and Alpha Wave in 2024. In 2025 the company launched Chemstack AI, an R&D platform that compresses molecule synthesis timelines from roughly 18 months to days.
Tatiana Fofanova
Tatiana Fofanova is the co-founder and CEO of Koda Health, a Houston-based B2B enterprise SaaS company that helps health systems and payers scale advance care planning. Trained as a molecular-medicine PhD at Baylor College of Medicine and a former HHMI scholar, she left bench and pediatric work after concluding that patients needed access and good information more than newer drugs. She built Koda out of the Texas Medical Center's Biodesign Fellowship in 2020 with co-founders Desh Mohan and Katelin Cherry, describing the product as 'TurboTax meets Duolingo' for the hardest conversations in medicine. The company now supports more than a million patients nationwide and raised an oversubscribed $7M Series A in October 2025.
Nick Whalley
Nick Whalley is the co-founder and CEO of Nutiliti, a utility management platform that handles the unglamorous but expensive work of turning power, water, and gas on and off across rental portfolios. A Dartmouth-trained engineer who spent three years on Goldman Sachs's electronic trading desk before leaving in 2020 to build software for property managers, Whalley runs a company whose pitch is blunt: manage properties, not utilities. Nutiliti automates activations, deactivations, bill payment, and accounting reconciliation, and exposes it all through a REST API so single-family rental and build-to-rent operators can stop drowning in utility paperwork.
Ryan DuChanois
Ryan DuChanois is the co-founder and CEO of Solidec, a Houston climate-tech startup that spun out of Rice University in 2024. Solidec builds modular reactors that pull molecules from air and water and, using only electricity, make industrial chemicals like hydrogen peroxide on-site - no centralized plants, no long supply chains, no carbon-heavy inputs. A Gates Cambridge Scholar with a Yale PhD and 20 peer-reviewed papers in membrane science, DuChanois traded the academic bench for the factory floor, aiming to abate over a gigaton of carbon emissions a year by reinventing how the world's chemicals are made.
Brooks Powell
Brooks Powell is the founder and CEO of Cheers (formerly Thrive+), a Houston-based consumer health brand built around DHM, a plant extract he first read about as a Princeton sophomore writing a neuroscience paper on alcohol. He licensed a permeabilizer technology from the university, launched in 2017, pitched on Shark Tank, and grew the company past $25M in revenue and 13M+ doses sold. A former religion major and Division I swimmer, he turned a class assignment into a category and earned a spot on the Forbes Next 1000 list.