Startup incubator unveiled in Ion District

By Hongtao Hu     2/18/25 11:10pm

The Rice Nexus in the Ion building was opened to the public Feb. 14. The Nexus will assist selected faculty, student and alumni startups with office space and industry mentorship, free of charge.

In a speech by Sanjoy Paul, the executive director of the Rice Nexus, he said the 10,000-square-foot business space provides strong industry and government partnerships to drive innovation, as well as an artificial intelligence ecosystem to transform Houston’s industries.

“If you have a startup, you have to scale, you have to really go commercialize,” Paul said in an interview with the Thresher. “We connect you with all the venture capital. We connect you with potential customers, without which you are not going to succeed. We connect you with the government, where the grants are.”

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Paul also said involvement from Rice undergraduates could launch a cycle of innovation. 

“If you’re a Rice student, one of the ways that many people get engaged is as interns to many of the startups,” Paul said.  “There’s already Rice startups, so [students] can get engaged as interns, and eventually they might get absorbed in the company, and in the process of being an intern there, they might come up with new ideas which could spawn new companies.”

Nafisa Istami, the innovation manager at the Rice Office of Innovation, said that the Nexus aims to connect Rice’s strong research program to the commercial sphere.

“The goal of the space is to provide a launchpad for Rice startups to come out of once they’ve left the hedges, if you will,” Istami said. “So we have a lot of companies that are leaving Rice that are still young, maybe 12 to 18 months out from a licensing event or from a corporation. We are utilizing Nexus as an incubation acceleration space to co-work out of.”

Istami said that the Nexus, in partnership with Rice Innovation, also funds venture commercialization through the One Small Step and One Giant Leap grants.

“A lot of our researchers are very interested in that space, but there is a funding gap in between, and so [the] One Small Step grant is aimed to address that gap, and focuses on companies that are spinning out from tenure-track faculty research labs,” Istami said.

In a presentation by Paul, the Rice Nexus also has a special AI focus in the Rice AI Venture Accelerator, which aims to identify and support AI startups to solve industry problems. 

For alumni Benjamin Chao ’23 and Praneel Joshi ’23, the Rice Nexus provides a potential space for their AI startup, called focai.

“Previously, as a student, I was also looking for startup opportunities, but [Rice] didn’t really have anything involved at the time,” Chao said. “When we were students, they added their entrepreneurship minor in my junior year, by then, it was kind of late. And so having Rice as a starter space was what we really wanted as an undergrad.”

Joshi said funding was particularly important for the pair’s next startup, TokenStream. 

“Funding is the most critical thing for a startup, so when you’re not funded and you’re trying to do something innovative and new, you’re just burning cash. You’re hoping that things will work out,” Joshi said. “Eventually you need to either start generating your own cash flow, which we’re trying to do, but it wouldn’t hurt to be able to get funding by the Nexus fund — which is now open to alumni.”

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