​The Longhorn Energy Club is proud to host our second Texas Energy Innovation Night, our premier fall event highlighting breakthrough energy technologies being developed in Austin, Texas.

​The event is Tuesday, October 20, 2026, from 5:30-8:30 pm in the Mulva Auditorium (EER) at UT Austin. This year, we are organizing three sessions (the agenda will be updated over the next few weeks):

​Forty Acres Panel: Discovery to Impact

​Graduate school is a great time and place to innovate! Hear from Connor Crawford, Founder and CEO of Pike Robotics; Ian Howard, New Venture Specialist at Discovery to Impact; and Joseph Schmidt, Founder at OmniSpectra.

​Pike Robotics originally spun out of UT Austin's Texas Robotics Lab and was originally funded by Phillips 66 to assist with managing their product storage and refining facilities using robots. The company deploys robots to perform dull, dirty, and dangerous tasks for nuclear plants, oil and gas facilities, and military units.

​Discovery to Impact is the institution within UT Austin that provides researchers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and investors with the resources to turn UT discoveries into solutions.

​OmniSpectra is an NSF-backed early-stage startup developing wearable, non-invasive sensing systems for large power transformers. Their company turns grid assets into self-aware systems by continuously detecting early-stage material degradation, enabling utilities to shift from reactive maintenance to material degradation.

​Gridraven: Optimizing Transmission Capacity

​Georg Rute is the CEO of Gridraven, the world's largest provider of dynamic line ratings by length of lines covered. Originally founded in Estonia, Gridraven has recently expanded to Austin, where it is deploying probabilistic forecasting models of the weather to optimize carrying capacity for transmission lines. Hear from Georg in a fireside chat about his company's technology and story.

​Nanoborne: Nanotechnology for the Subsurface

​Vitaly Sergeev is the CEO of Nanoborne, a pioneering tech startup focusing on applied nanotechnology for the petroleum and geosystems industry. Nanoborne has developed a nanoparticle surfactant used for subsurface fluid flow management, which is used in geothermal well drilling, carbon storage, and upstream oil and gas sectors. Hear from Vitaly in a fireside chat about his company's technology and story.