Ember’s journey from scorching espresso to remedy transport

Ember’s first Indiegogo marketing campaign drew sideways glances when it launched in 2015. Would anybody truly purchase a $129 heated espresso mug? Almost a decade later, nevertheless, it’s clear that the preliminary pitch was merely the tip of the startup’s heating/cooling iceberg.

TechCrunch lately sat down with Clay Alexander, the agency’s founder and chairman, to take a deep dive into Ember’s historical past — and catch a glimpse of the place issues are headed.

“We’re well over 3 million units [of the smart mug] at this point,” the chief tells TechCrunch. “We’re nearing a million units a year now. When I first created this technology, I had so many people in my life say, ‘oh Clay, you’ll never sell a $100 electronic coffee mug. You’ve lost your mind.’ As a founder, you just have to have perseverance, and you have to have this gut instinct that overpowers logic.”

The primary prototype of the Ember mug was a Frankensteinian prototype involving a Zojirushi mug and a bunch of electronics. Picture Credit: Ember

Past the corporate’s better-known espresso receptacle, Ember has made a foray into the medical sector with the Ember Dice, a transport field for issues that want to remain temperature-controlled — primarily medicines. It additionally makes heated child bottles now, too.

“I always say to people that cooling is much harder than heating. Heating is fairly straightforward in that you can create a heater by using a resistive heating element or a resistive heating wire. I mean, heck, you can just put electricity and any wire. It’s gonna warm up, right?,” Alexander notes. Cooling is a distinct beast, nevertheless. “People don’t realize that you’re not pumping cold energy into a fridge — you’re actually pulling heat energy out of the box.”

Beginnings

Ember’s inception will be traced again to a relatable second of frustration: a lukewarm cup of espresso. Alexander, a self-proclaimed espresso aficionado, longed for an answer to keep up the proper temperature of his favourite brew from the primary sip to the final. The trail to bringing Ember to life was difficult. As a {hardware} startup, Ember confronted distinctive obstacles that usually deter entrepreneurs from venturing into this house. From the excessive product improvement and manufacturing prices to the advanced net of IP safety and worldwide enlargement, Alexander navigated a maze of challenges that may take a look at his resolve and dedication.

Regardless of obstacles, Alexander remained steadfast. He assembled a crew of engineers, designers and entrepreneurs who shared his ardour for making a product that may improve the coffee-drinking expertise and push the boundaries of what was doable in client know-how. As Ember started to take form, Alexander and his crew poured numerous hours into analysis and improvement, testing varied supplies and applied sciences till they arrived at an answer that met their bar. The outcome was a glossy, intuitive mug that might keep a exact temperature for hours, managed by means of a easy smartphone app. Certainly, 2,000 backers rallied to the thought on Indiegogo, giving the corporate a $360,000 money injection and its first trace at market validation. Not lengthy after, the corporate raised a collection of fairness rounds, together with a $13 million Series C and a $23 million Series E.

Balancing kind and performance was an early problem acquainted to anybody within the {hardware} house. The mug wanted to successfully keep temperature whereas additionally being visually interesting and comfy to carry. After intensive testing and refinement, Ember finally settled on a glossy, minimalist design that seamlessly built-in the heating know-how into the mug’s partitions. The mug additionally options wi-fi charging, customizable temperature settings and a smartphone app that permits customers to manage it remotely.

Then there’s the problem of really bringing the product to market. Not like software program improvement, {hardware} improvement requires important upfront funding in supplies, tooling and manufacturing processes. As Alexander notes, these prices can shortly balloon, placing immense strain on startups to safe funding and generate income as quickly as doable.

Throughout the ocean

As soon as a product is developed, {hardware} startups should navigate the advanced world of mental property safety. In a fiercely aggressive market, safeguarding one’s improvements is essential to long-term success, however securing patents and emblems will be time-consuming and costly. This generally is a daunting prospect for startups with restricted assets, requiring cautious strategizing and prioritization.

At one level, Ember discovered an unimaginable alternative, which turned out to be a substantial problem. Till this level, the mugs have been already on sale in Starbucks and in different high-profile retail shops. However then, one of many largest and most influential retailers on this planet got here knocking.

“We were expanding not just in the U.S. It took us about two years to get into the Apple store — the amount of testing they put your product through is wild — and the number of times I flew up to Cupertino… but it was worth it,” Alexander remembers. “But Apple does not like to do localized launches. If they like your product, and you’ve passed all their tests, they basically come to you and say, Okay, we want to do this on a global scale.”

On the time, Ember was solely transport to North America, however when Apple got here knocking and stated it wished to begin promoting its product in 27 nations, they didn’t ask whether or not to leap, however moderately how excessive to hop.

A Transportable Medication Cooler Prototype created in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic in 2018. Picture Credit: Ember

“I remember going to my ops team and saying, ‘Guys, Apple’s coming to us with a silver platter, which would turn us into an international brand overnight. Are we going to do this?’ And it was a couple of weeks of whiteboarding and blind panic,” Alexander laughs. “And ultimately, we just said, ‘You know what, you only live once, let’s do this,’ and it was the most excruciating year of our lives. We went from North America to 27 countries with Apple.”

As Ember started to broaden internationally, Alexander and his crew encountered challenges round navigating the regulatory landscapes of various nations, securing dependable manufacturing companions and adapting to native market circumstances. Every problem required a deep understanding of the worldwide {hardware} ecosystem. Alexander credit Ember’s success on this space to the power of his crew and their willingness to be taught and adapt on the fly.

Going from scorching to chilly

Whereas Ember’s sensible mug has been a convincing success within the client market, the corporate’s ambitions lengthen far past scorching drinks.

A prototype of a cylindrical drugs cooler was developed in collaboration with the Mayo Clinic. This idea was from 2019. Picture Credit: Ember

“I remember thinking, ‘What can we do with our temperature-control technology to help save lives?’ I could see that we were becoming very successful in consumer,” Alexander explains. “I had Wyatt Decker, the CEO of the Mayo Clinic in Arizona, on my board of directors. It was really cool to have a big-time healthcare executive on our board. And he would invite us out to the Mayo Clinic. And we would sit there in these conference rooms with doctors and scientists. Our idea was to unearth how our temperature-control technology could help solve pain points in healthcare, whether it’s medicine or moving organs around or what-have-you.”

Alexander and his crew retreated again to the lab to begin tackling the challenges it had found, placing its dozens and dozens of patents to good use. The corporate says it has greater than 200 granted patents at present, virtually all of them in temperature management, whether or not it’s semiconductor refrigeration applied sciences, heating applied sciences or the management methods to handle all of it.

The work gave rise to Ember Dice, a tool that guarantees to resolve one of the crucial urgent challenges within the medical area. Many drugs, significantly these utilized in most cancers remedy and vaccine distribution, require exact temperature management to keep up efficacy. Even slight deviations from the optimum temperature vary can render these drugs ineffective or dangerous. The Ember Dice addresses this problem by offering a conveyable, extremely correct, temperature-controlled surroundings for storing and transporting delicate drugs. Leveraging the identical ethos utilized in its clever mugs, the Ember Dice maintains a exact temperature vary, guaranteeing that the medicines inside stay viable and efficient.

The Ember Dice dashboard permits shippers to see the medicines in transit in near-real-time, full with temperature readouts. Picture Credit: Ember

If correctly executed, the know-how could possibly be a recreation changer. By enabling the protected and environment friendly distribution of temperature-sensitive drugs, the Ember Dice might assist to enhance entry to life-saving therapies in distant or underserved areas. It might additionally scale back the price and complexity of vaccine distribution, a essential consideration within the face of worldwide well being crises just like the COVID-19 pandemic. Upon getting the know-how, tons of alternatives begin to floor. For instance, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency revealed that it makes use of Ember’s know-how forward of the 2024 Olympic crew trials.

Alexander notes that he sees the event of the Ember Dice as a pure evolution of Ember’s mission to make use of know-how to resolve real-world issues. By making use of its experience in temperature management to the medical area, Ember is poised to make a significant distinction within the lives of sufferers worldwide.

Spinning out

The choice to separate Ember into two distinct divisions — client and life sciences — was a strategic transfer designed to permit every arm of the corporate to concentrate on its core competencies and goal markets. By creating a dedicated life sciences division, Ember can channel its assets and expertise towards growing new purposes for its know-how within the medical area, from enhancing the storage and transportation of vaccines to enabling extra exact temperature management in laboratory settings.

The cut up permits the corporate to serve totally different buyer populations — each within the product sense and within the investor sense — and the corporate employed a former Dyson exec (Jim Rowan) as the CEO of its consumer division.

“About a year and a half ago, we actually spun out Ember Life Sciences as a standalone entity,” Alexander says. The corporate initially saved the identical cap desk for each corporations however allowed the 2 entities to diverge from there. “It allowed us to raise capital from the healthcare industry, and we’re quite proud of some of our equity partners. Carrier — the world’s largest commercial refrigeration manufacturer — is our investor. We also have some other investors as well in the healthcare space. By spinning it out, we could attract life sciences and healthcare type of equity investments and board members, etc., as opposed to when we had them all combined.”

From cool to very chilly certainly

“We’re actually trying to move into the cell and gene therapy space with cryogenic shipping,” Alexander teases, exhibiting me a photograph of the prototype system. He then swears me to secrecy, saying I can’t share the image I’ve seen.

As Alexander seems to the longer term, he’s full of pleasure and chance.

The Ember Dice can hold merchandise at 5degC (41F) for 72 hours. The corporate’s subsequent foray is cryogenic transport, through which the temperature should keep at -150C (-238F) for prolonged intervals.

“Negative 150C is no joke. It’s a hell of a thing. We use liquid nitrogen, and the shipping box has a sponge-like material, so the nitrogen gets absorbed into the walls. If it gets tipped over, nothing comes out, it’s a dry shipper,” Alexander says. “It’s a major engineering challenge. You have to do it in a vacuum, and it’s all very complex engineering.”

Alexander says the cryogenic shipper is round 18 months from being out there as a business product, however the Ember crew is psyched in regards to the progress it has made to this point.

“We’ve run thermal chamber testing and have been able to keep the payload below negative 150 Celsius for 10 days,” Alexander explains. “The target audience for this is cell and gene therapy — super high-tech medicine that is literally curing cancer and saving lives. Talk about a feel-good thing as a brand, right? I love selling coffee cups, don’t get me wrong, but being able to save lives has been something that all of us can rally behind.”