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Howdy Rocket Networkers!!!
Hope you're getting a real Labor Day weekend…the kind where the laptop stays shut and the grill does the talking.
Enjoy it. September in H-town is popping, and it RN is here to help you plan it out..
🔐 HOUSTON, CYBR.SEC.CON IS COMING UP
If you work in tech, AI or infrastructure — or you'd just prefer the bad guys didn't ruin your Tuesday — block off the middle of the month.
CYBR.SEC.CON. takes over the George R. Brown on September 15–16, and it is not a small one. Thousands of security professionals. 100+ experts on stage. 200+ exhibitors. 10+ tracks, plus hands-on villages and workshops with the researchers, students and vendors who actually keep the lights on.
Go to level up your career, harden your company, find new tooling, meet customers — or just to work out what the heck is happening in security right now.
🎟️ Use code RKTNTWK-15 for 15% off — GRAB YOUR TICKET
📅 September 15–16, 2026
📍 George R. Brown Convention Center — Downtown Houston
Cybersecurity isn't getting less important. Might as well know the people shaping where it goes. 🔐
🤖⚡ AI + ENERGY = VERY HOUSTON
Our friends at Houston AI Club just handed Rocket Network subscribers a code. Not a 10%-off-and-feel-nothing code.
50% off the EnergyAI Users Group Annual Conference. Half price. 👀
It's the inaugural one, and the room is stacked — ExxonMobil, Chevron, Aramco, Halliburton, SLB, NOV, NVIDIA, Google and Dell on stage all day, talking about what's actually running in the field versus what's still a pilot deck. If you've watched what Houston has been doing lately, this is where a lot of it is happening.
📅 Monday, September 28
📍 Thompson Houston — 1717 Allen Parkway
🎟️ Use code HAI50 at checkout — REGISTER HERE
Heads up: first 100 people only. Then it's gone.
Big thanks to Houston AI Club for looking out for the community. 🚀
🚀 HOUSTON, WE'RE HACKING
Rocket Network is an official media partner for the first-ever AITX Community Hackathon at POST Houston. My recommendation is short: go.
No PhD required. No three co-founders. No quantum AI for nuclear fusion. Show up and build something.
Come solo, bring up to three friends, or arrive with nothing and find a team at the kickoff. Apps, agents, dev tools, automations, or something nobody saw coming. Supabase is sponsoring and you can use them for the backend, but there's no required stack and no required theme.
Every team submits at 7. Judges pick three. Those three present to the room.
📅 Saturday, September 19 — doors 9:00 AM, hacking starts 10:30, winners at 8:30 PM
📍 POST Houston
Come with an idea. Come looking for one. Come looking for a co-founder. Just come build.
🎟️ REGISTER →
⚡ MEANWHILE, HOUSTON HAS TWO ENERGY WEEKS
Two. Same city. Same week. Nearly the same name.
Houston looked at its energy week and said, "you know what would make this better? Another energy week." 😂
Choose your fighter:
🥊 Houston Energy + Climate Startup Week — Sept 14–18
🥊 Houston Energy & Climate Week — Sept 12–18
Both are real, both are good, and between them there are founders, investors, operators, and roughly a hundred events.
My take? Merge them. One city, one massive week, everybody bouncing between events instead of picking a lane. Easier to navigate, and it would feel twice as big.
Until somebody puts me in charge of the calendar — choose your fighter. Or do what we're doing and go to both.
🚴 ONE MORE THING: BIKETOBERFEST NEEDS SPONSORS
Biketoberfest is getting close and we're looking for a few more companies who want in.
The deal is simple. You support the event, we make noise about you: a shoutout in this newsletter, exposure across our LinkedIn community, and your logo on the official Biketoberfest shirts.
And the money isn't going in our pockets. Proceeds go to three nonprofits:
❤️ 🚲BikeHouston
💙💛 HTX4Ukraine
❤️ RedM
Good cause, good people, good visibility. If your company wants a piece of that — and a logo on a shirt people will actually wear — hit reply and tell me you're in. I'll send the details.
cheers,
- oleg 👊
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Choose from 800+ hours of character voice performances, 1,723 hours of QA'd conversational data across 56 emotional states, or 1,000 hours of expressive, multi-language data with full emotion tagging. Every dataset ships with clear licensing, signed consent, and usage rights baked in, so your legal team sleeps easy and your model trains on data it can actually use.
7 of the world's top 10 AI labs already use Voices. Request free samples and hear the difference professionally directed voice data makes.
P.S. Know a Texas company doing something insane? hit reply.
Got a founder friend who needs to hear this? forward them this email. let's raise Houston's tech game together.
At Rocket Network, we do the dirty work for you, curating Houston's tech scene so you spend less time scrolling and more time building. Want to be featured or sponsor? Hit reply.
LET'S ROCKET NETWORK!
We are using emojis to guide subscribers in our event list 📅📍
🚀 - must attend
🔥🌶️ - something hot
🤓💻 - good for developers and other technical folks
🦄💰- venture capital and investing-related
⚡- energy-related
♻️- renewable energy and sustainability-related
🏥 - health care related
🎖️🪖 - veteran or military related
🏅 - sports tech related
₿ - web3 related
HERE ARE OUR PICKS FOR HTX THIS WEEK
Tuesday, September 8
Ram Prasad of Delence on why AI programs stall. His framing: most companies have a collection of AI projects, not an AI strategy. Built for CEOs, VCs and boards.
Blue People's Tech and Tequila Talk, with Taylor Golden. Start at the life you want and work backwards to the business model. Tequila included.
Wednesday, September 9
Masterclass Wednesday, then two days of conference. Digital twins, automation, data-driven ops and decarbonization across upstream, midstream and downstream — built for the people actually deploying it, not pitching it.
The southwest edition. Coffee, founders, no agenda.
Heath Butler on whether your idea is actually viable before you go looking for money. Investors will ask the same questions, so you may as well hear them first.
Thirty years running. Home tinkerers and career sysadmins in the same room, getting each other unstuck.
Thursday, September 10
⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11) - DAY1
Masterclass Wednesday, then two days of conference. Digital twins, automation, data-driven ops and decarbonization across upstream, midstream and downstream — built for the people actually deploying it, not pitching it.
The north-side innovation crowd. Worth the drive if you build anything above the Beltway.
Entrepreneurs, investors and the TMC Innovation community, plus a look inside the device labs.
No stage, no slides, no panels. Upstream operators and the people selling them AI and IoT, talking honestly over a beer. Vendor-light by design.
The Houston chapter of the largest LGBTQ+ tech community. Second Thursday, free, allies welcome. Same room as Upstream, straight after.
Friday, September 11
⚡💻12th Annual Digitalization in Oil & Gas — Hyatt Regency Houston West (9/9–9/11)- DAY@
Masterclass Wednesday, then two days of conference. Digital twins, automation, data-driven ops and decarbonization across upstream, midstream and downstream — built for the people actually deploying it, not pitching it.
The flagship, in the Ion lobby. Start with the why, not the job title.
Weekly Friday morning for people actually shipping with AI. Agents, AI-native products, tooling, and what broke last week.
Free one-on-one mentoring from people who have already run the business you are trying to build.
Licensing NASA tech, or partnering with Johnson Space Center. Walk-ins welcome. Come with a vision, leave with a partnership.
The weekly founder roundtable runs right after Joey. Bring your ask.
⚠️Hosting a tech meetup or startup event? Submit it via the RocketNetwork Event Submission Form to boost your visibility!
MONEY ON THE TABLE
(This section doesn’t exist on the web. It’s for subscribers only. Feel free to forward — your friend just has to subscribe to get it weekly.)
Slush 100 €500,000 handed to one team on stage in Helsinki, zero equity taken. The largest equity-free prize any startup competition has ever paid. Open to anything founded in 2023 or later that has raised under €10M and is still seed or earlier. You do need a Startup Pass to be selected, so factor that in. Closes September 7, so today is the day - APPLY |
Fast Forward 2027 Accelerator $25,000 in unrestricted funding, three months of mentorship and a Demo Day in front of hundreds of social impact investors. For tech nonprofit founders in the US. Closes September 7 at 11:59 PM PT - APPLY |
Her Agenda Breakthrough Grant $5,000 to one woman entrepreneur, now in its third round. Her Agenda started this on their 17th anniversary and has funded a founder every cycle since. Short application, no revenue floor. Closes September 18 - APPLY |
Skip’s $10,000 Grant One $10,000 grant, open to any US entrepreneur or small business owner over 18. No revenue floor, no industry filter, and the application is genuinely short. Skip has paid out to more than 2,000 businesses so far. Closes September 18 - APPLY |
Camelback Fellowship $40,000 unrestricted, a dedicated 1:1 coach for 16 weeks, and an alumni network that has raised over $50M between them. For early-stage founders building in education or conscious tech. Hybrid, so you only travel for the kickoff and graduation. Closes September 18 - APPLY |
TWU StartUP Grant $5,000 for Texas woman-owned startups, funded by the state legislature. You do not need any affiliation with Texas Woman’s University to apply. The money goes toward one specific project you name in the application, so have quotes ready. Closes September 23 - APPLY |
Character Labs $200,000 for 5%, wired on the day you are accepted with no milestones attached. Five weeks run by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, the Design Sprint guys, and the whole program points at one thing: product-market fit. Software startups incorporated in the US, 15 companies max. Closes September 23 at 11:59 PM PT - APPLY |
Techstars Spring 2027 $220,000 to join one of the Spring 2027 accelerators, plus mentorship and lifetime access to 11,000+ founders and investors. This one takes equity, unlike most of the list, but it is the most established name here. Closes November 18 - APPLY |
Entreprenista Evolve Grant $5,000 to one woman founder, from Entreprenista and IT Cosmetics. You need a US business, woman-owned or woman-led, at least a year old and doing $100,000 or more a year. Closes November 30 - APPLY |
The Amber Grant Three $10,000 grants every month for women-owned businesses, plus three $50,000 grants at year end drawn from the monthly winners. One application covers all of them, including the startup track if you are still pre-revenue. There is a $15 fee - APPLY |
America’s Seed Fund (NSF) Up to $2 million in non-dilutive funding, and the NSF takes zero equity and zero IP. Deep tech across AI, energy, medical devices, robotics and semiconductors. They fund about 400 companies a year and accept project pitches year round, so there is no deadline to miss - APPLY |
Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation Up to $300,000 unrestricted over three years, plus a DRK partner sitting on your board for that whole stretch. For social enterprises with real proof they move the needle for underserved communities. Applications open year round - APPLY |
Claude for Startups Up to $100,000 in Claude API credits, no equity taken. You need to be founded in the last four years with institutional funding, and Claude has to be central to what you are building. Name your investor when you apply. The form takes two minutes and it is rolling - APPLY |
FEATURED EVENTS
Startup Circle Houston EVERY FRIDAY AT THE ION
CYBR.SEC.CON. — 9/15–16, George R. Brown Convention Center Two days of cybersecurity in downtown Houston. 10+ tracks, 100+ speakers, 200+ exhibitors, plus workshops and an innovation program.
Use code “RKTNTWK-15” for 15% off your CYBR.SEC.CON. Ticket
FEATURED JOBS
__________________________________________
That’s a wrap for now, RocketNetworkers,
Stay tuned, and keep grinding!
Disclaimer: The content in this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by any sponsors. All opinions and information are those of the author and not of the sponsors or affiliated organizations.
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