Jeremy Pitts is the founding Managing Director of Activate Houston, where he runs the two-year fellowship that turns research scientists into hardware founders. Activate is a non-profit: it gives each fellow more than $300,000 across two years, takes no equity and charges no fee, and the Houston community he has led since its launch in 2023 is housed at the Ion. His first cohort took eleven fellows from over a thousand national applicants.
He came to it from twelve years inside a hard-tech company that had to survive its own technology. Pitts joined OsComp Systems in July 2010 and stayed through both its names after that, Hicor Technologies and then Reach Production Solutions, rising from Vice President of Product Development to Senior Vice President of Engineering and then Chief Technology Officer. He led the development and commercialization of the company's near-isothermal multiphase gas compression technology from its inception, through several generations of prototype, and carried responsibility for engineering, manufacturing and supply chain along the way. Forum Energy Technologies acquired the business in December 2021, and he stayed on to hand it over. Eight granted US patents are in his name.
He is also one of the founders of Greentown Labs, which four MIT-linked startups began in a Cambridge warehouse in 2011 and which is now the largest climatetech incubator in North America; he was involved through 2015. Earlier he ran mechanical engineering at Energy Innovations, an Idealab company, where he led the RayTracker solar tracking product that First Solar later bought, and began his career at Raytheon on the targeting pod for the F/A-18. He holds a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from Caltech and, from MIT's Leaders for Global Operations program, both a master's in mechanical engineering and an MBA.
