Origins
Matias Kopinsky was born in Houston, one of several brothers, and the newest chapter in a family that has been crossing borders for a century. His father's parents came out of Europe, his grandfather from Switzerland and his grandmother, Luisa Kopinsky, from Austria, and built a life in Buenos Aires. Luisa survived the Holocaust; her testimony, recorded in 2001, is kept by the family. His mother's family came from Poland, Kyiv, and Lithuania and settled in Córdoba. His parents grew up in those two Argentine cities, then emigrated once more, to Houston, where Matias and his brothers were born. His mother's father founded Deal Medical Supply on Schumacher Street and runs it to this day. Spanish came first at home, and with it an instruction he still repeats in their words: acordate de donde venis. Remember where you come from. His mother and her mother spent decades teaching in Houston's schools.
He went where the city sent him: Herod Elementary, Meyerland Performing and Visual Arts Middle School, Bellaire High School, where he played football. He taught children with disabilities how to play soccer with TOPSoccer from sixth grade through twelfth. Then he paid his own way through the University of Texas at Austin, working three jobs, researcher, librarian, lifeguard, while earning a degree in petroleum engineering.
The Record
- B.S. Petroleum Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 2018, with the Business Foundations Certificate
- Fundamentals of Engineering license, United States
- Lifetime member, Lloyd Parkans Scholarship Committee, a $10,000 annual award
- Society of Petroleum Engineers · Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers · American Association of Drilling Engineers · Alpha Epsilon Pi
Europe to Argentina to Houston to Tel Aviv, and he is the one who came home.
The Campaign
For a while he just complained about the state of Houston's schools. Then his mother told him to stop complaining or do something about it, so he did. In 2021 he ran for the Houston ISD Board of Trustees in District I, the district that had educated him. It was in real trouble. In 2018 the Texas Education Agency found the sitting board had violated the state's Open Meetings Act: five trustees, including the incumbent in his district, had met privately to push out the interim superintendent, and the dysfunction that followed was steering the district toward a state takeover.
He was outspent by more than ten to one. His two opponents ran on large PACs and out-of-state money, the incumbent's campaign alone backed by a single Washington PAC that put in more than sixty-nine thousand dollars. Matias built the campaign with Andrew Monzon and ran it on about nine thousand, raised in small checks from neighbors, with a volunteer team, a lot of doors, and yard signs across the district.
The Difference · HISD District I, November 2021
Cost per vote, across all three campaigns.
Where the money came from
His whole campaign raised less than that.
He lost, and did it well: 2,220 votes at about four dollars each, the most efficient campaign in the race by a wide margin. For a first-time candidate in his mid-twenties, outspent more than ten to one, it was a real showing. He still calls it one of the best experiences of his life.
The Decade
He joined Chevron in Houston in 2018 and stayed a decade, long enough for the work to change shape three times. First as an engineer running enhanced oil recovery pilots across the United States, Canada, and Latin America, lifting recovery by 35 percent, and carrying a first-of-its-kind surfactant technology to Argentina's Vaca Muerta shale.
Then as a Senior Product Line Manager, handed a chemicals line losing $3.5 million a year. He turned it into a multi-million dollar profit center across North America, Latin America, and the Middle East, ran an international portfolio spanning Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Canada, Argentina, and Texas, commercialized a new surfactant technology into more than $25 million of revenue, and built the division's pricing model.
Then the company moved him across the world, and the work got national. From Herzliya he rose to Strategy Lead for the Leviathan and Tamar platforms, roughly nineteen billion dollars of steel and seabed supplying about seventy percent of Israel's electricity. He supported the $35 billion gas export framework between Israel and Egypt and the negotiations around it, delivered $30 million a year in savings through an operations overhaul, and helped cut losses by $200 million a year, building working relationships with Israel's Ministry of Energy and Ministry of Environmental Protection along the way.
The whole time he kept a hand in the community that trained him: judging Introduce a Girl to Engineering, teaching at STEM camps, showing up at the Houston Food Bank.
The Crossing
On July 13, 2023, he made aliyah alone. No family came with him. He landed in Israel with Nefesh B'Nefesh, which later told his story in its Live Love Israel campaign, and started over: a new country, a new language, on his own. His family had spent a century moving toward safety, Europe to Argentina to Texas, without ever reaching Israel. He was the first to make it home. For the grandson of Luisa Kopinsky, a Holocaust survivor from Austria, arriving on his own carried a particular weight.
Ashore, he built. In 2024 he founded BH Strategy Consulting, a Tel Aviv advisory practice connecting American, European, and Middle Eastern partners with energy and infrastructure opportunities across the East Med: an LNG offtake proposal for a Spanish industrial client, a behind-the-meter power concept that cut a data center's tariffs by about twenty percent, briefings on the Israel, Cyprus, and Egypt corridor, research on the India to Middle East to Europe corridor known as IMEC. Gina Cohen, one of Israel's leading natural gas experts, credits his "genuine local insight and strong professional credibility."
And he wrote it all down. As a Senior Correspondent for LevantIntel he covers Israel's economy and strategic position, from record defense exports as an instrument of diplomacy to the price of diplomatic isolation.
Current
In June 2026 he left Chevron to build a company around a problem he had watched for a decade: the grid takes years to expand, and the demand for power will not wait. Immedia Power, co-founded with Rony Baum, twenty years of global commercial leadership, and Werner Huhn, the engineer behind the Ferrari 458 V8 and the Porsche GT3, fourteen patents to his name, makes modular on-site power generation with motorsport discipline: multi-fuel, variable-RPM machines that synchronize with the grid and ship on a pickup truck.
The thesis fits in a sentence. Grid upgrades are measured in years, his machines are measured in weeks. As Chief Operating Officer he runs the build: more than $60 million in signed letters of intent, a pipeline past $150 million across more than a dozen verticals, patents pending, a working prototype, a production site secured, validation by BTD Belgium.
Off the Record
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WindKitesurfs off the Tel Aviv coast. He grew up on the Gulf and ended up on the Mediterranean.
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Snow & GrassSkis in winter, plays soccer year-round, still coaches a decent through-ball when asked.
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Four LanguagesEnglish and Spanish from Houston, Hebrew from immersion, French from curiosity. His favorite word in Hebrew is סגור, sagur, which means "done deal."
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WaterA lifelong swimmer, most at home in the open water.
- His Instagram bio, unchanged for years: "swimming with the dolphins."