What we’re doing:
We’re developing actively powered wearable cooling systems. Our first product in development is a base-layer shirt that uses an advanced form of evaporative cooling to cool a large amount of body surface area with the switch of a button. Being evaporative, it uses a small battery and water to create a powerful cooling effect. Uniquely, we can reduce the weight of actively powered wearable cooling 4-10x vs. competitive approaches. This enables a jacket-like weight, instead of something too heavy to be practically wearable.
For science fiction fans, yes, this is like the real-world version of the “stillsuits” from Dune. As has been the case many times, large weight reductions can spur paradigm shifts in adoption and we think we can do that for wearable cooling, moving from sci-fi to reality.
3 Reasons We're Working on Wearable Cooling:
The need to keep your body temperature regulated is a basic human need, sitting at the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy. Unlike indoor spaces, where air-conditioning is widely available in the 21st century, there aren’t good solutions today when cooling needs to be wearable or portable (i.e. when A/C isn’t available due to outdoor work or in some indoor environments, like many manufacturing settings). We’re focused on this problem for 3 reasons:
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People. Working 8-12 hours a day in the summer heat is brutal in much of the country. This applies to 30-50M people in the US who don’t have air conditioning on the job. Working under chronic heat stress makes you 3x(!) more likely to report low job satisfaction, in addition to being a safety issue and a productivity issue. We want to change that and we think we can improve millions of lives in a very tangible way.
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Significance. In a world that has industrialized and where fossil fuels have allowed vast reductions in the amount of heat-exposed labor (most of us are no longer farmers), we often overlook that ~20% of the US workforce is still heat-exposed. This labor is of tremendous economic importance – far more valuable than all of the oil and gas purchased in the US economy. Heat makes our workforce less productive every year. No business today would have office workers in un-airconditioned environments. In the future, outdoor workers won’t lack cooling either, because it's operationally efficient.
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Solvability. Secondly, as engineers, this problem is also a fascinating one that gets relatively little interest. How is it that in a world with self-driving cars, IoT thermostats and rocket boosters that can land themselves, we still don’t have effective personal cooling technology? We think this problem has largely been overlooked (in terms of venture investment and engineering effort) and thus poses an opportunity for innovation with reasonable levels of investment.