The Texas Entrepreneurship Exchange for Energy (TEX-E) is a first-of-a-kind collaboration among The University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, University of Houston, Rice University, Prairie View A&M University, Greentown Labs, and MIT’s Martin Trust Center for Entrepreneurship, to create a powerful student-driven energy and climate entrepreneurship ecosystem in Texas. 

Why TEX-E and UT Austin? TEX-E is building a bridge between Texas and Boston. Texas has long been known as the energy capital of the world. However, to lead the world into the energy future, Texas must continue to attract and retain talent by creating a strong, vibrant innovation ecosystem to support the next generation of entrepreneurs and companies. The core elements necessary to build this ecosystem are already in place. Texas universities attract a rich and enormous pool of talent, with deep and long-standing connections to the energy industry that must ultimately bring new innovations to scale. UT Austin is well-known for doing energy research that matters and quickly bringing it to scale—conceiving of new ideas, making discoveries, and utilizing its many demonstration and test sites to take new technologies from the lab into the field. UT has also helped establish Austin, Texas, as the “Silicon Hills” of innovation and is home to Austin Technology Incubator (ATI), the longest running technology incubator in the nation, with one of the oldest programs for energy and clean tech startups. In Boston, the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship is the driving force of MIT’s entrepreneurial education curriculum, and Greentown Labs is North America’s largest climatetech incubator—both have a proven track record of launching and scaling climatetech startups. Given the collective energy and climate expertise and innovation capacity of these institutions, bringing them together into one collaborative program—TEX-E—provides UT’s students with unprecedented opportunities to shape the energy industry of the future. 

Timeline and Goals. Now in its third year, the TEX-E brand and program continue to scale and gain influence across UT campus and the region. More students than ever are attending UT’s many energy/sustainability/entrepreneurship events, especially TEX-E-sponsored events, as well as taking the Energy Ventures class out of the Jon Brumley Texas Venture Labs and participating in the TEX-E Fellows program, the TEX-E startup accelerator program, and other student-focused startup incubator programs like the Smart Energy Call for Innovation (C4i) hosted by Genesis, UT’s startup fund. UT’s TEX-E program has quickly established itself as a model other universities can adopt and continues to grow in both presence and impact.