For many working professionals, coffee is life. But still, getting caffeine up and running in their blood vessels requires a minimum amount of patience - the time coffee cools down enough to be drunken.
Some people cannot wait even that little time span. After all, time is money. With that particular audience in mind, a group of Babson students invented a coffee mug that automatically cools down coffee to the perfect temperature in exactly one minute.
“We all want something perfect in our life."
Thero - which is the name of both the product and the startup - is short for thermodynamics, the set of scientific principles that make the device work. Basically, the mug is wrapped up in an aerospace material that is “like a huge sponge,” CEO Chloris Ruohan Yang explained in an interview, and “is used to build the heat shell of missiles,” she added.
Here’s how it works. First, the material soaks up the heat from the coffee. Then, it slowly releases it. As a consequence, the coffee temperature drops fast and it’s kept ideal and consistent for at least five hours, the company said. Such temperature is preset and cannot be customized; in the current version of the product, it’s set at 140°F (60°C).
“We can do a range of different temperatures in the future,” Yang said. “Some people may have a sensitive tongue, so they could set the temperature lower.”
The company, which recently presented at the Babson Summer Venture Showcase at the Federal Reserve, said in an interview that it will launch a crowdfunding campaign this fall, most likely on Kickstarter, to raise around $60,000 to cover manufacturing costs. The Thero mug, which will be manufactured in China and then shipped to the U.S., comes in only one size, and it’s currently priced $50.
“We all want something perfect in our life,” Yang, who co-founded the company with Allen Zhang and Nathen Xin Nie, said. “A cup of coffee looks so simple, so small, but so important in our daily life. Just think about how many [cups of] coffee are we drinking each day.”
