Lambda Tea was a self-serve boba machine built by hacking a mini-fridge. It was later funded by Y Combinator for their Winter 2018 batch. See 1, 2.

To build our prototype, we repurposed a refridgerator, connected peristaltic pumps to an arduino, and connected the arduino to an android tablet. Our android app accepted payments through venmo, then vends boba when payment is verified. Imagine "boba on tap" running 24/7 out of a dorm room in East Campus.

After MIT's Sandbox Innovation Fund awarded us $1,000 to build a boba machine, we worked on our project every night from midnight to 2AM for a month. Our goal was to make our boba machine fully self-sufficient like a vending machine. Anyone could walk up to it at any time, choose their boba flavor, venmo the Lambda Tea account, so they can receive boba.

Here is an exclusive look inside:

The friendos

The most important part of this project. Those people are Robert Henning and Jingwei Ma. I'm the girl with the bad dye job.

Results

Our machine was surprisingly popular. We dispensed over 500 cups of boba within a month and sold each cup for $3.50. 203 unique customers purchased Lambda Tea boba and 46 peoples purchased 4+ cups of boba within two weeks.

Later, we applied to Y Combinator, a startup accelerator, and were funded $120,000 in exchange for 7% equity. We were the youngest team in our batch. We took a leave of absence and stayed in San Francisco for 8 months to develop our company. However, we came back to school. That is a long story for another day.