founder focus: meet the founders of caffio

Caffeine shows up in almost everyone’s daily routine, but it is still treated as a guessing game. People drink it to stay focused, to get through long days, or simply out of habit. Others avoid it altogether because of anxiety or crashes. The common thread is that very few people actually know how much caffeine works for them, or when they should be consuming it.

To solve this, Caffio is building a smart water bottle paired with an app that personalizes caffeine intake based on each user’s body and lifestyle. The goal is not to encourage more caffeine, but to remove the guesswork and smooth out the experience by giving people control over something they already rely on every day.

Caffio’s team is not only very kind, but cracked. Karina is a Wharton junior who casually speaks five languages and leads their finance, marketing, and operations. Omar (also a Penn student) is studying AI and is responsible for building Caffio’s core caffeine optimization algorithm. The third co-founder, Reda, is a recent Cornell grad leading the company’s hardware, chemistry, and prototyping.

Here’s the easiest way to think about Caffio: it’s a water bottle that knows how much caffeine you should be drinking, and an app that tells it what to do. The bottle uses these caffeine cartridges, each one with up to 400 milligrams of caffeine (made in-house), attached to a pump that pulls small amounts of caffeine and doses it into the straw. How much caffeine you get and when is controlled by the algorithm. The subscription plan is roughly one cartridge per day, sold as a subscription around $30 a month.

Omar built the algorithm off real caffeine research, starting with how caffeine actually moves through the body, things like half-life and metabolism, and then gets tested on real people across the spectrum, from heavy caffeine users to people who barely drink it. Everyone reacts differently, so the system is designed to learn. For their upcoming pilot, they are going to hand out wearables (Apple Watches and Whoop’s) to also gather data like sleep and heart signals to see how timing affects the body, not just how users say they feel.

Also, their system is built with real life in mind, not a perfectly controlled routine. You are still going to drink coffee sometimes, and that is expected. The bottle itself is not meant to hold coffee or any other caffeinated drinks. Instead, caffeine consumed outside the bottle gets logged in the app, and the algorithm adjusts around it. That separation is intentional, because the dosing only works if the bottle has full control over how caffeine is delivered. The only non-negotiable rule is keeping caffeinated drinks out of the bottle itself.

The team was very honest about the fact that software is fast, and hardware is not. What I respect is that they are intentionally learning the hard parts. They are not product designers by training, but they want to understand all of the constraints in building a prototype, and know enough to iterate fast when they do decide to bring in outside help.

Material wise, the inside of the bottle will be stainless steel because it’s safe and non reactive. The outside is still being decided. I will say that plastic allows more customization for different versions/colors they may want to create.

Caffio is not trying to sell to everyone on day one, and Karina described two main groups they care about early.

They are still experimenting, and depending on the user cases that win during their pilot rollouts at Penn, they are open to pivoting. I think they are aware that in making a consumer company, you have to be aware that there will be many user types. Some people might use it all day, some might only want a quick boost, and some might want to slowly cut back on caffeine. So, the pilot is about seeing what people actually do and following it.

From my perspective, Caffio’s marketing and go to market approach feels very disciplined for a student founded hardware company. They are resisting the urge to chase attention before the product is ready, which is especially important in a category like caffeine where first impressions can easily skew negative if the context is not explained properly. Right now, they are using a waitlist (which has over 3,000 signups…sign up here!) and have been seeing many early signups from medical and health adjacent students, which makes sense because those students tend to be the typical “caffeine addicts”.

I think starting on university campuses is the right move. Campuses are one of the few environments where distribution and the social scene overlap naturally, and early adoption at Penn will tell them more than a broad consumer launch could.

Longer term, they are thinking of the bottle as a wedge into a much larger idea around personalized caffeine delivery. If they execute well this can become a health infrastructure tool rather than a gadget. That said, I think this vision will really work with patience. What gives me confidence is that so far, the team is letting the product earn the right to scale, and that mindset is something many founders lack!

Currently, Caffio is pre-revenue but has raised $25,000 from a small friends and family round, and received early support from Penn.

If I had to define what Caffio actually needs in a VC partner or accelerator, it is someone who understands how to bring complex hardware to market. A good partner would help them simplify the story (storyteller’s are the new PM’s in the valley) and guide them through building a consumer hardware company.

I walked away from this conversation genuinely excited. It is always refreshing to talk to student founders who understand their market and are committed to making their product both effective and enjoyable to use.

On a personal note, the team was incredibly kind, and anyone who gets the chance to advise them or work alongside them in the future will be lucky to be part of something genuinely special.

Selfishly, I am also hoping to be one of the people who gets to try Caffio during its rollout at Penn.