Forbes Recognizes Houston Entrepreneur Whose Tech Solution Could Help CRE Save The Earth

At 29 years old, Rawand Rasheed might have done more to eliminate commercial buildings’ carbon emissions than most industry players will do throughout their entire careers.

Forbes named Rasheed to the 30 Under 30 Energy and Green Tech 2025 List earlier this month for his role as co-founder and CEO of Houston-based Helix Earth Technologies. Helix Earth plans to use a technology Rasheed co-developed for NASA to create hardware technology to save up to 50% of the net energy used in commercial air conditioning.

Using air conditioners and fans accounts for nearly 20% of the total electricity used in buildings, an important metric considering energy demand to cool spaces will more than triple by 2050 without action to address energy efficiency, according to an International Energy Agency analysis.

Helix Earth’s add-on technology, now in the pilot phase, can produce drier air to save up to 50% of net energy used in commercial air conditioning, according to a news release. 

“At least half of the energy used to run air conditioning goes to pulling moisture out of the air,” Rasheed said. “I knew that was a totally wasted load on the cooling coils.” 

Air conditioning emits more carbon than the entire aviation industry and is on track to account for 8% of global carbon emissions by 2050.

Cutting that in half would reduce emissions by 4%.

“I was motivated by the sheer size of the problem,” Rasheed said.

Solving sizable problems has inspired Rasheed's research from the beginning. Rasheed is Kurdish and was born in Iraq, and he moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1996. His father, a civil engineer, grew up in a Northern Iraqi village that had limited resources, and he was taught to not waste water, pick up trash and limit emissions when possible.

“He ended up passing away pretty early in my life, when I was 18, but what he put into me, this interest for science and engineering and then also for the climate, that really stuck with me,” he said.

Rasheed went on to study engineering himself, then became the first person in Oregon to earn the NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities fellowship. While there, he discovered a new way to distill urine in zero gravity, an experience that showed him he could apply his research to commercial use, he said.

“I did my PhD at Rice University in Houston, and started to work on doing the research to understand ‘What can we use this technology for here on earth?’” Rasheed said. “Quickly, I found out there were a bunch of problems that we could solve with that technology, one of them being we could build a product that can reduce energy used in air conditioning and in cooling.” 

Though the product is still in the pilot phase, Helix Earth has collected abundant lab data while simulating different environments to ensure effectiveness, he said. The next step will be piloting the product in buildings, and he hopes to get it on the market in 2026, he said.

Helix Earth is benefitting from government incentives, but Rasheed said he is not concerned about the upcoming presidential administration’s antagonistic attitude toward environmental measures.

“We’ve always strived to build a product that just makes sense to people … We don’t want to rely on some regulation or incentives to make this viable,” he said. “It’s nice to have because it accelerates your sales and growth, but we don’t want that to be necessary by any means.”

And no matter the administration, energy security is a big deal, he said, adding he believes the product will make business sense for the consumers.

Helix Earth’s initial product will be easy to add on to cooling systems for commercial buildings of up to 50K SF, Rasheed said. That means a building owner should realize savings equivalent to the cost of the product within three to five years.

The company closed its oversubscribed $5.6M seed funding last month and has grant funding from the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Helix Earth has an office at Greentown Labs, a climate tech startup incubator in Midtown Houston, and employs 14 people full-time.

Rasheed said he is proud of his recognition from Forbes, but he is hesitant to take the credit.

“It is an honor and it’s a huge recognition,” Rasheed said. “[But] there’s always a village behind you, so this is a reflection of so many people that poured into me from an early age. It’s a reflection of our team here. Everybody’s working super hard.”