Michigan State grad Brendan Wang invents device to help others quit vaping

DENVER — Tina Hrabak still remembers the first time she heard Brendan Wang talk about CAPNOS Zero, a product he developed to help people quit vaping.

Wang, 23, was still a student at Michigan State University, and one of about 50 college students she was speaking to in 2019 at a Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization conference in Tampa, Florida.

"I asked for people to just voluntarily introduce themselves," said Hrabak, who was running a program for early-stage business startups.

When Wang stood up, he was holding a prototype of his invention, a device that looked like a vape, but wasn't. Instead, it delivered flavored, pressurized air instead of tobacco to satisfy behavioral cravings associated with vaping.

She watched as he inhaled from it and then, with ease, delivered a pitch for his business.

"Ideas mean nothing if you don't go out and talk to people that might be your customers and really understand the problem as much as possible," Hrabak said.

Wang had done both, she said.

Much of what he knows about vape addiction Wang learned through personal experience. The Canton, Michigan, native started vaping at age 14. Five years later, he was a student at MSU studying supply chain management who still struggled to quit. His decision to stop vaping led to his development of CAPNOS Zero.

Wang launched the company before he graduated from MSU. Today, CAPNOS employs four full-time employees and more than 20 part-time members and contractors. The products were launched in September 2021 and more than 30,000 products have since been shipped to 25 countries, he said. This year, Wang, who is queer, was named one of Colorado LGBTQ Chamber of Commerce's "40 under 40 Business Leaders."

A first-hand understanding of vape addiction

Wang was at the tail end of eighth grade when he took his first hit from a vape. Taking part in vaping with others gave him a way to belong at a time when he desperately wanted to, he said.

"For one, in a social aspect, now all my friends are vaping so I was addicted to wanting to feel like I belonged to a group," he said. "I've personally struggled with severe loneliness. In eighth grade, I had multiple attempts to take my own life. As I was vaping, it was a way to be included in a group as much as it was, at that point, becoming a pretty serious physiological addiction to the chemical nicotine."

By the time he was at MSU, though, Wang's nicotine tolerance was so high that he craved nicotine less than the satisfaction he got from inhaling a vape.

"That's when I started to realize this was all the more behavioral," he said. "It was the ritual itself that was providing that sense of reward and satisfaction. There just hasn't been anything on the market to address or satisfy those tactile behavioral cravings."

Wang developed CAPNOS Zero while participating in MSU's Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

The pressurized air inhaler costs about $25 and mimics the throat hit of vaping using only natural extracts and puffs of air. Different flavors of extracts cost about $14 a pack.

He credits an initial prototype of the device with helping him shake a relapse of vaping in 2019.

"We started making production molds in 2021," Wang said. "We have solid data and survey results from testimonials from hundreds of customers.

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Growing his business

CAPNOS' mission is to "help 1 million people quit vaping or smoking by 2027," Wang said.

"Our philosophy is always about solving the issue," he said.

Wang graduated from MSU in 2022 and now lives in Denver but CAPNOS is still based in Commerce Township, Michigan, and still takes an active role in anti-vaping and addiction initiatives, he said.

In June, his team participated in youth-focused sessions hosted during the Youth Advisory Council of Lansing's "Dodge the Stress" event that focused on mental wellness.

Hrabak, a former manager for Future Founders who now works at LongJump, a venture fund in Chicago, has watched Wang's idea become a growing business.

Wang received a fellowship through Future Founders and later helped guide others with their own ideas, she said.

"He ended up, after he finished his fellowship, becoming a mentor to some of those ideas-stage entrepreneurs," Hrabak said.

Wang has been growing CAPNOS over the last year. The company will ramp up its presence on social media this year and is making moves to get its products on shelves at major retail stores.

"We're starting to expand into government-funded research on the efficacy of CAPNOS products and really encourage more research into behavioral cravings and oral fixations and how tools that address this can actually become cessation tools.

"It's just been an incredible ride," Wang said. "I'm just very grateful that we're able to keep at it consistently and keep doing what we can to prosper and grow and help more people."

Contact Rachel Greco at rgreco@lsj.com. Follow her on Twitter @GrecoatLSJ .

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Addicted to vaping at 14, MSU grad Brendan Wang now makes tools to help others quit