Helix Earth, a clean-tech company that started in the research lab of Rice mechanical engineer Daniel Preston, has secured $5.6 million in seed funding.
The company grew out of work conducted by Rawand Rasheed, who earned his Ph.D. in MECH last year from Rice while working in the Preston Innovation Laboratory. The startup is developing retrofit devices to reduce energy consumption in air-conditioning systems.
“This investment will enable the Helix Earth team to accelerate development of our hardware technology designed to disrupt a significant portion of the commercial air conditioning market, an industry ready for innovation,” said Rasheed, co-founder and CEO.
His co-founder and chief business officer is Brad Husick, who earned his B.A. in astrophysics from Rice in 1986.
Last year, Rasheed received a two-year fellowship from Chain Reaction Innovations at Argonne National Laboratory to develop clean energy technologies. “Lowering humidity levels in the air reduces energy loads on air conditioning systems by up to 80 percent,” he said, “decreasing the cost of operation. We propose a retrofit dehumidification system designed to reduce energy use by more than 50 percent.”
His dehumidification system is based on a droplet capture filter called Helix MICRA, originally developed in collaboration with NASA for use in space. The technology enables high-rate, high-efficiency dehumidification by providing a large area of contact between liquids and gasses. The project has been incubated at Greentown Labs in Houston since 2022, and Rasheed has earned several patents.
In 2022, Rasheed’s work won first place in the H. Albert Napier Rice Launch Challenge, a startup competition sponsored by the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He also won first place in the Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy startup competition and received the 2022 Hershel M. Rich Invention Award from Rice.
The funding sources include Veriten, the energy research, strategy, and investing firm, as well as Anthropocene Ventures, Semilla Capital and individual investors from venture capital and private equity firms. The company also secured grants from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.
“The enthusiastic response from investors reinforces our team’s confidence in our ability to transform innovation-starved sectors such as commercial air conditioning with an easy-to-install-and-maintain solution that benefits distributors, mechanical contractors and most of all, building owners, with a positive benefit to the environment,” Rasheed said.