rice-university
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David Zhang and the problem with being good at things
Before he co-founded Biostate AI, David Zhang programmed DNA, competed in national math finals, and let an internship slip away over summer housing. His next challenge is deciding what deserves his attention.
Farid Virani and the long way across the street
He once waited tables near Rice University. After building Prime Communications from a single Houston store, Farid Virani returned with his family to help shape the education of the students next door.
Daniel Hosler and the curious business of sharing control
Before Allied OMS, Daniel Hosler built software, agricultural products, and a career in private equity. His next undertaking put a different question at the center of growth: who gets a voice when the business gets bigger?
Jacob Nagy and the art of starting again
After years advising energy deals, Jacob Nagy began building businesses for buyers himself. A $1.45 billion asset sale and a new fund exceeding $1 billion show why the Avant co-founder keeps returning to the Permian Basin.
Matthew C. Levy and the art of choosing the next experiment
Before founding NobleAI, Matthew C. Levy studied what powerful lasers could make matter do. His next questions took him into scientific software, fusion investing and public life - with an unexpected place for artists along the way.
B. B. Hollingsworth Jr. and the art of keeping things local
An accountant helped bring independent dealerships onto Wall Street without handing every decision to headquarters. For Group 1 Automotive co-founder B. B. Hollingsworth Jr., the question was how much to bring together - and how much to leave alone.
Alex Arevalos and the education of a founder
A kitchen-table beginning, a Rice doctorate and a succession of Houston startups taught Alex Arevalos how much of company building happens beyond the invention. Starling’s former CEO carries that education into his next venture.
Mohit Aron and the trouble with separate boxes
From the Google File System to Nutanix and Cohesity, Mohit Aron has kept finding opportunity in things that refuse to work together. His third company, SciFin, brings that habit to the business of selling.
Claire Harvey and the value of the second string
Losing a starting spot at Texas A&M gave Claire Harvey a lesson she carried into energy investing: a team still needs you when the game changes. At EIV Resources, that lesson has become a way of building a business.
Bethany Andell and the two-year deal that outlasted Hollywood
She came home to Houston for an MBA and a two-year commitment to the family business. Bethany Andell stayed to work on a harder question: how a company makes its story believable.
Don Spear
Don Spear is the co-founder and CEO of OpenSesame, the Portland-based marketplace that lets companies find, buy, and manage elearning courses the way people buy songs on iTunes. A Rice University engineer and Harvard MBA, he spent decades scaling companies - from PetSmart through its IPO to Banfield Pet Hospital's expansion from 4 to 250 locations - before founding BlueVolt and then OpenSesame in 2010. Today he leads a catalog of tens of thousands of courses and an AI-driven push to make workplace learning easier to find and use.
Jim Reinhart
Jim Reinhart is the CEO of TEKVOX, a New Braunfels, Texas company reshaping the professional audiovisual industry with factory-built, pre-programmed Drop-In AV systems for classrooms, meeting rooms and complex spaces. A Rice University electrical engineer with more than 35 years in technology, he built his career across semiconductors and startups, co-founding and leading Luminary Micro, the lead partner on ARM's Cortex-M3 processor, through its 2009 acquisition by Texas Instruments. At TEKVOX he pushes a simple conviction: AV is IT, and it deserves the same discipline, standardization and lifecycle management as the rest of an organization's technology stack.
Solidec
Solidec is a Houston-based climate-tech company spun out of Rice University that builds modular electrolyzers to make essential chemicals - starting with ultra-pure hydrogen peroxide - on-site from just air, water, and electricity. Its porous solid-electrolyte reactor skips the centralized plants, hazardous trucking, and fossil-fuel feedstocks of conventional chemical production, cutting emissions by as much as 90%. Founded in 2023 by Ryan DuChanois, Yang Xia, and Rice professor Haotian Wang, the company raised an oversubscribed $2M pre-seed round and has been backed by Chevron Technology Ventures' Catalyst Program, the Activate Fellowship, and a NASA SBIR award.
Jeffrey Dietrich
Jeffrey Dietrich is a bioengineer-turned-coffee-founder who built Rarebird around paraxanthine, the molecule your body actually makes when it metabolizes caffeine. After a PhD at UC Berkeley in Jay Keasling's lab and nearly a decade co-founding and running R&D at the industrial biotech company Lygos, Dietrich turned his own dwindling caffeine tolerance into a company. Rarebird sells decaffeinated specialty coffee infused with lab-grade paraxanthine, promising the lift of coffee without the jitters, crash, or ruined sleep. Backed by Y Combinator, AgFunder, and two NSF grants, the company holds U.S. patents on the process and won the Specialty Coffee Association's Best New Product award.
Ruchir Shah
Ruchir Shah is the founder and CEO of SkillCat, a mobile-first training platform that has taught more than 300,000 people to enter skilled trades like HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and appliance repair. A Rice-trained energy engineer with a Stanford MBA, he started building animated industrial simulations after researching the BP oil spill and concluding that bad training kills. His first company, LearnToDrill, trained 25,000 oil and gas workers for clients like Halliburton and BP. When COVID threw skilled workers out of jobs while contractors begged for help, Shah pivoted to SkillCat to bridge that gap with simulation-based, $10-a-month trade education. He also runs the GRIT Foundation to introduce trades careers to underserved youth, and once spent a summer doing stand-up comedy in New York.
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.
Parker Meeks
Parker Meeks is the President and CEO of Utility Global, a Houston-based clean-energy company commercializing H2Gen, a system that makes low-cost clean hydrogen on-site from industrial waste gases without electrolysis. A Houston native and electrical engineer turned McKinsey partner, he previously led hydrogen fuel-cell maker Hyzon as CEO. At Utility he is steering the company from demonstration into global commercialization, including a first commercial-scale steel project with ArcelorMittal in Brazil.
Dan Adler
Dan Adler is the CEO of Sourcegraph, the code intelligence platform powering search and AI across 54 billion lines of code for companies like Uber, Stripe, and Atlassian. A Rice computer science graduate and Stanford MBA, Adler joined Sourcegraph in 2016 as an early employee - writing infrastructure code, selling the first contracts, and building every major business function from scratch - before being elevated to CEO in December 2025 when co-founder Quinn Slack spun out Amp Inc. He has shepherded the company from zero revenue to $50M ARR and a $2.6B valuation, and believes agentic AI will only amplify the need for enterprise-grade code context.
Soups Ranjan
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Kevin Harvey
Kevin Harvey is a General Partner and co-founder of Benchmark Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, which he helped launch in 1995 alongside Bob Kagle, Bruce Dunlevie, Andy Rachleff, and Val Vaden. Before turning to investing, Harvey built and sold two software companies - StyleWare (acquired by Apple's Claris in 1988, becoming ClarisWorks) and Approach Software (acquired by Lotus in 1993) - giving him rare operator credibility. At Benchmark, he has backed transformative companies including eBay, Twitter, Upwork, MySQL, OpenTable, and Proofpoint. Outside of venture capital, Harvey is the founder of Rhys Vineyards in the Santa Cruz Mountains, a critically acclaimed winery focused on Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, where he applies the same data-driven rigor to terroir as he does to startup evaluation.
Spencer Greene
Spencer H. Greene is a General Partner at TSVC (清谷资本), a certified women- and minority-owned seed-stage venture firm in Los Altos, California built on the Tsinghua Entrepreneur and Executive Club network. He leads the firm's healthtech practice after three decades as an operator, M&A executive, and two-time founder in Silicon Valley. Greene holds patents across graphics, networking, and encryption; ran M&A at Juniper Networks (buying the kinds of startups he now backs); and developed the 'Design for Exit' framework to help founders understand what makes them genuinely acquirable - not just successful.
Yan-David Erlich
Yan-David 'Yanda' Erlich is a General Partner and Head of Tech Investment Practice at B Capital Group, a multistage global venture firm. A four-time venture-backed founder and CEO, he brings an unusual combination of operator depth and investor acuity: he scaled Weights & Biases from $3M to $50M ARR as COO/CRO before joining B Capital in January 2025, and previously built the enterprise venture practice at Coatue Management. His personal angel investment in Weights & Biases achieved 55x DPI. He focuses on AI co-workers, ML infrastructure, and B2B AI applications, with checks ranging from $5M to $50M.
Felix Ejeckam
Felix Ejeckam is the Co-Founder and CEO of Akash Systems, a San Francisco-based deep-tech company that invented GaN-on-Diamond semiconductor technology - a breakthrough that enables dramatically better thermal management for both satellite communications and AI data center servers. A serial entrepreneur with two prior exits, Ejeckam holds 80+ patents and 100+ scientific publications, was named a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, and led Akash to a $68.2M CHIPS Act preliminary agreement and the world's first diamond-cooled NVIDIA GPU server deployment.
Cameron R. Wolfe
Cameron R. Wolfe, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Scientist at Netflix's Globalization team and the author of Deep (Learning) Focus, a twice-weekly Substack newsletter with 60,000+ subscribers that translates cutting-edge ML research into approachable long-form essays. A Rice University computer science PhD, he has built a reputation as one of the clearest explainers of large language models, RLHF, and AI agents in the field, bridging academia and industry with methodical depth and intellectual generosity.