Stacey Gorniak takes the top prize at the Innov8 Hub Startup Pitch Day.
Photos by Brenda Cruz
The University of Houston Technology Bridge recently hosted its eighth Innov8 Hub Startup Pitch Day competition, pitting innovators across eight businesses to win the grand prize.
The latest Innov8 Hub Startup Pitch Day was May 26 and featured 16 inventors representing eight companies. Each participant had five minutes to pitch their ideas to a table of judges, potential investors and a curious audience.
This year’s top prize — outside of attracting investors — was $2,000 and 1 year of free lab and office space, which was taken by Stacey Gorniak, founder of Awarely, a company focused on advancing preventative care for women’s health through non-invasive wearables.
“Pitch Day is a snapshot of what Innov8 Hub is built for — giving UH innovators the space, mentorship and resources to turn a bold idea into a real company,” said Tanu Chatterji, director of startup development at UH Tech Bridge. “Seven cohorts in, it keeps proving that this ecosystem produces founders who can compete anywhere."
What is Innov8 Hub?
Innov8 Hub is a founder-driven series of accelerator programs for early-stage startups, originally launched with the UH Small Business Development Center and now led by UH Tech Bridge.
Each cohort features six to eight aspiring entrepreneurs who want to explore bringing their ideas to market. So far, the program has helped 84 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.
"Every cohort proves the same thing — give founders the right framework and the right room, and they'll surprise you,” Chatterji said. “That's what Innov8 Hub is all about."
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.
Meet the Founders
Awarely: Stacey Gorniak
Awarely is advancing preventative care for women’s health through the development of non-invasive wearable devices designed for quick and effective breast health monitoring. The technology helps improve access to early screening and long-term monitoring.
Optivast: Iordanis Kesisoglou, Michael Nikolaou and Chaskey Barry
Optivast uses patient-specific data from hospital instruments to rapidly design personalized therapies for severe bacterial infections within hours of detection. This helps clinicians respond faster to drug-resistant pathogens and sepsis risks, including survival and leading to shorter hospital stays for patients.
Advreag: Chengzhi Cai and Guoting Qin
Advreag is developing advanced reagents and workflows that help researchers better study protein structures and interactions. Their technology aims to improve the speed, precision and reproducibility of mass spectrometry analysis for biological research.
Meshletes: Guoning Chen and Muhammad Naeem Akram
Meshletes is tackling the time-consuming challenge of manually repairing broken 3D geometry, a major challenge in simulation workflows. Its cloud-based meshing engine converts raw 3D models into simulation-ready meshes in minutes, helping engineers save time and reduce computational costs.
RETTAB Technology: Zhifeng Ren and Minchu Zou
RETTAB Technology is developing sustainable recycling solutions for lithium iron phosphate batteries by recovering high-value materials from end-of-life batteries for new battery production. The company aims to support the growing energy storage and electric vehicle markets by reducing waste, strengthening domestic material supply chains and making battery recycling more profitable, scalable and environmentally responsible.
CircuWell Energy: Chinedu Junior Okere and Dimitrios Georgios Hatzignatiou
CircuWell Energy uses proprietary algorithms to help oil and gas operators improve produced water management, reduce operational costs and identify opportunities for reuse and resource recovery. The company aims to transform produced water from a liability into a value stream, thereby making field operations across the energy sector more efficient, sustainable and economically optimized.
Petro Research and Analysis Corp.: Mohamed Adel Gabry, Mohamed Y. Soliman and Amr Ramadan
Petro Research and Analysis Corp. uses advanced signal processing to transform existing wellsite pressure, vibration and acoustic data into actionable engineering insights for oil and gas producers. Its platform helps operators better understand subsurface activity, fracture behavior and inter-well connectivity without requiring new field equipment.
Duhat Creative Minds: Tobiloba Ajibola
Duhat Creative Minds developed Vistacks, a platform the brings together visitor management, workforce coordination, space booking and incident tracking into a unified operation systems designed to help organizations improve efficiency, security and decision-making across modern workplaces. By bridging fragmented systems, Vistacks helps organizations interact with technology more efficiently, leading to better user experiences.