HOUSTON, TX – (March 2025) –By Aaron Fitzgerald, CEO of Mars Materials, and Bryan Guido Hassin, CEO of DexMat
Houston’s Manufacturing Edge: Why Two CEOs Moved Their Ventures To Booming Texas
Houston has long been the city for humanity’s most ambitious endeavors. From pioneering space exploration at NASA to performing the first successful artificial heart implantation at the Texas Heart Institute, this city has a history of tackling society’s most significant challenges head-on. Today, as the global energy landscape undergoes a profound transformation, Houston is once again at the heart of a manufacturing revolution.
Last month, Houston’s second annual Houston Energy & Climate Week (HECW) kicked off with its theme, “The Power of And” to explain what makes Houston an unstoppable place to build and scale manufacturing technology. As CEOs who scoured the country for the best place to site our critical materials startups—Mars Materials and DexMat—we think “And” boils down to three main ingredients: the right people, the right place, and the right time. HECW gave Houston a chance to show how “And” accelerates our companies’ missions to improve freshwater, transportation, and energy like nowhere else on earth.
The Right People: Houston’s Abundant Talent
As seasoned team builders, we knew the most important determinant of startup success isn’t its technology, but its people. Houston has an abundance of exactly the type of talent manufacturing innovation demands: world-class engineers, experienced technicians, pioneering scientists, seasoned financiers, and proven sales executives.
Since Houston’s founding, it has welcomed newcomers seeking opportunity. As the “Energy Capital of the World,” Houston attracts residents from all over the world more than anywhere else in the United States. Literally any background, skill, or expertise you need is here. Houston’s research universities, including Rice University and the University of Houston, provide both collaborative R&D opportunities with global experts and a steady pipeline of top-tier graduates.
As newcomers ourselves, we learned ‘Houstonians’ are hospitable—visibly demonstrated when Houston opened its arms to half-a-million Hurricane Katrina refugees from New Orleans. This ability to turn a crisis into a success story reflects another quality innate to Houstonians: they are problem solvers. When Apollo 13 faced mortal peril 200,000 miles from Earth, the astronauts called Houston with those famous words: “Houston, we have a problem.” And Houston solved it. That same relentless, creative problem-solving spirit permeates the city’s approach to today’s new manufacturing opportunities.
The Right Place: Infrastructure Advantage
Houston has the physical infrastructure to turn ambitious visions into reality. Everything’s bigger in Texas, and that’s exactly what manufacturing startups need to scale their innovations.
The business environment here is unmatched. Houston has acres of inexpensive land where you can build factories and production lines without breaking the bank. Houston’s business-friendly climate includes rapid permitting processes that are crucial for manufacturing startups. When you’re trying to move quickly from lab to market, waiting months for regulatory approvals can be an existential threat. In Houston, the bureaucratic machinery actually works with you.
Energy is the lifeblood of any manufacturing venture, and Houston offers abundant, inexpensive, and increasingly clean energy. Texas leads the nation in renewable energy production, generating more wind and solar power than entire countries. For companies like ours that require significant energy inputs for advanced manufacturing processes, dependable, low-cost energy is essential.
Houston’s industrial infrastructure provides access to virtually any material or chemical a manufacturing venture might need. The region hosts one of the world’s largest concentrations of chemical and petrochemical facilities. More Fortune 500 energy companies are headquartered in Houston than anywhere else in the world. For manufacturing startups, having these industry leaders down the street creates opportunities that simply don’t exist elsewhere.
The Right Time: Houston’s Material World
For innovation focused on energy and materials, there has never been a better time to be in Houston. Energy and materials are now so deeply interconnected that every breakthrough in energy technology—from deepwater oil & gas to advanced geothermal to nuclear fusion—depends entirely on materials with exceptional properties. For Houston to maintain its global position, establishing leadership in advanced materials is essential.
Several macroeconomic trends are amplifying this urgency. The transportation sector demands lighter, stronger materials for more efficient, longer-range vehicles. The federal push to reshore American manufacturing requires rapid growth of domestic production capabilities. America’s strategic imperative to decouple from foreign supply chains of critical materials has exposed dangerous vulnerabilities that can only be addressed through advanced materials. Even the AI race is driven by materials—producing the best-conducting, most energy-efficient materials at the greatest scale is both an economic opportunity and national security imperative.
Houston’s decisive actions to seize such a generational opportunity include establishing The Ion, a 16-acre innovation district that serves as a hub for energy and manufacturing startups. Globally-renowned incubators like Greentown Labs and Energy Tech Nexus have established campuses there.
“And” in Practice
20 miles west of The Ion, we hosted locals and international guests at our facilities at the Shell Technology Center Houston (STCH). By displaying our exciting collaboration with Shell, our inaugural HECW event enabled guests to witness first hand what makes Houston one-of-a-kind. With its collaborative environment, network, world-class expertise and infrastructure, STCH keeps us capital efficient and agile.
For DexMat, STCH has provided crucial testing capabilities and technical expertise as we’ve scaled production of our product from laboratory curiosity to industrial reality. Mars Materials has similarly benefited from STCH’s capabilities, accessing specialized equipment and technical knowledge that would have taken years and millions of dollars to develop independently.
“And” this wouldn’t have been possible without Houston. HECW is now concluded but the world now sees that Houston leads the transformation of the world’s most critical technologies. With this new era of innovation, Houston is once again taking on a familiar role. Just as Houston was mission control for humanity’s greatest adventure, it’s positioned to be mission control for a trillion dollar transformation that is already defining the next century.
For manufacturing innovators looking to build the future: you are welcome in Houston. The people are here, the place is ready, and the time is now.
Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the potential to change the world.
Aaron Fitzgerald is CEO of Mars Materials, Inc. PBC.™, a Shell and Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Fellows-backed company transforming carbon to clean dirty water and produces carbon fiber for transportation and energy. Bryan Guido Hassin is CEO of DexMat, producer of the highest-performance, most sustainable conductive material in the world. Both companies chose to locate their operations at the Shell Technology Center in Houston, Texas.
