Ember’s first decade has been a journey. The Southern Californian startup first hit our (and most people’) radar as a mug firm. The firm captured a good bit of press consideration with its high-end digital mug designed to maintain drinks a constant temperature. Nichey? Sure. Mostly pointless? One might actually make the case. But it was cool (or heat, I suppose) sufficient to garner little bit of early adopter buzz.

If February, the corporate outlined the beginnings of a shocking pivot. CEO Clay Alexander spoke to TechCrunch about Ember’s plans to undertake its temperature regulating expertise for non-consumer purposes. At the top of the yr, it grew to become clear that it might be focusing new efforts on the chilly chain — particularly medical transportation. A month later, it unveiled the Ember Cube delivery system.

Image Credits: Ember LifeSciences

Today, the corporate introduced that it will likely be spinning out its efforts within the type of Ember LifeSciences. The standalone vertical started life with an funding from Cardinal Health introduced late final yr. Brian Bejarano of Cardinal will be part of as president and common supervisor for Ember LifeSciences.

“The Ember Cube is the first of many healthcare technologies developed by our team, and Ember LifeSciences is the entity where all our inventions in the healthcare space will live,” Alexander stated in a launch tied to right now’s information. “With Ember Lifesciences, the goal is to deploy our technology to disrupt the healthcare distribution industry and improve the way we transport temperature-sensitive medicines and vaccines around the world.”

Image Credits: Ember LifeSciences / Five Flute (opens in a new window)

The new entity has a pair of recent delivery containers within the pipeline that construct on the preliminary Cube expertise: “an ultra-low temperature shipper and a cryogenic shipper. Both are intended to be used to transport cell and gene therapy products and will also include the same cloud-based temperature reporting, GPS location tracking and return-to-sender technology featured in the Ember Cube.”

Between each the continued vaccine rollouts and seemingly countless provide chain points, there hasn’t been a warmer time to launch a chilly chain firm.