Up until this point in its history, Ember’s been known for one thing: smart mugs.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. After all, the company’s flagship precision heated mug is a pretty cool device that not only keeps your coffee at the perfect temperature, but can reveal insights like that 10:51 AM is peak coffee drinking time across America.
But for anyone who’s talked to the company CEO Clay Alexander, an inventor with over a hundred patents to his name, you get the sense that he and Ember have lots of cool new ideas up their sleeves they’d like to bring to market if they only had the time and money. While I’m not sure about how much time Alexander has on his busy hands nowadays, he and Ember look to have taken care of the money part with their just-announced $23.5 million funding round.
In the press release announcing the new funding, Ember mentions both its cold chain technology and precision heated baby bottles as areas they plan to invest in. From the release: This expansion includes Ember’s Cold Chain Technology, which seeks to disrupt the current pharmaceutical cold chain with the world’s first self-refrigerated, cloud-based shipping box. The company also has plans to grow its consumer vertical with revolutionary technology to improve infant feeding and further releases in innovative drinkware solutions.
The company’s cold shipping box technology will keep vaccines and other temperature-sensitive medical supplies at a constant temperature as they make their way to their destination. Alexander first teased the idea back in 2018 in a podcast with The Spoon, when he told me the company had already built a prototype that uses the company’s semiconductor-powered refrigeration technology to keep up to forty vials refrigerated at a constant temperature.
“You could strap that thing on the back of a moped and send it into a village in Haiti and save lives,” said Alexander.
During that same conversation, Alexander also talked about how heating water for his infant daughter made him realize baby bottles could be an excellent potential application for precision heating technology. “You pull it out of the fridge, and there’s a little base you couple to the bottle,” Alexander said. “When you couple it, it heats the milk and formula to 98.5 degrees, which is body temperature.”
While the announcement indicated the company would expand into new consumer drinkware products, I was a bit bummed there was no mention of one of Alexander’s neater ideas: precision-heated dinnerware. It’s a product the company already had working prototypes for in 2018: “It just looks like a dinner plate, but it’s magically keeping your hot food hot and your cold food cold,” said Alexander at the time. The plate would have heating zones, that would allow cold potato salad to stay cold and heat food like steak and, if you move your steak, the heat will track under the plate.
Whatever they have in store, I’m intrigued to see the company add new products beyond their original smart coffee mug.
