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Ember founder and CEO Clay Alexander invented the Ember Mug, the temperature-controlled coffee cup first sold at Starbucks in 2016. But he didn’t want that to be his legacy. “What can we do with our temperature-control technology that can help save lives?” Alexander recalls thinking. Unsteady temperatures can be disastrous when shipping and storing medical products, so he created the Ember Cube, a reusable shipping box with built-in sensors that track the temperature of medical liquids and adjust settings accordingly using the company’s proprietary refrigeration system. This year, the Boston Marathon used the Cube to ship blood samples to Utah for drug testing, a trial that led to an Ember partnership with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.
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