FIU student invents groundbreaking product for babies, lands on ABC’s ‘Shark Tank’

When she gave birth to her son about three years ago, Veon Brewster used dry-erase markers and little sticky notes to keep track of her breast milk bottles.

One day, exhausted, she and her husband mixed up the bottles and fed baby Cayden expired milk, which led to vomiting, colic and a fever.

“After the mom guilt went away, I said to myself, ‘OK, something has to exist out there that can help us alleviate some of this mental load as new parents,” Brewster now remembers.

She quickly asked about 200,000 moms in a Facebook group how they tracked their milk, and everyone said they did it manually. Brewster, who works for Google and is pursuing a PhD in computer science at Florida International University, couldn’t believe it.

“I was like, ‘Wait, what? There’s got to be a better way,” she recalled this week.

Soon, Brewster fixed her issue — the same issue thousands of other parents and caregivers face. And the solution landed her a spot in one of the most-watched TV shows in the country: ABC’s “Shark Tank.”

She invented a groundbreaking product she called Veba Baby, a monitor that adheres to baby bottles like a bracelet.

Veba — a word made up of the first two letters of Veon’s name and the first two letters of “Baba,” her son’s nickname for his bottles — measures the temperature around the bottle and constantly calculates the expiration date of breast milk or formula.

Users can connect the monitor to an app on their phones and see the status of all of their bottles. They can locate missing bottles, check how much their baby is eating, and schedule feedings. They get notifications when a bottle is about to expire or has already expired.

How Veba got to ‘Shark Tank’

Brewster, who studies how humans interact with computers at FIU, partnered with a mechanical engineer and worked for two years to bring her idea to life. She and her husband Sean, the chief operating officer, finally launched the company in August 2023.

But before they posted the website and started selling the product, Brewster participated in a three-month immersive program at Techstars, a company that teaches early-stage entrepreneurs how to pitch investors, hire personnel and get mentors, among other much-needed lessons.

During the Techstars graduation, Brewster said she gave a presentation about Veba. And she didn’t know it at the time, but a “Shark Tank” producer happened to be sitting in the audience.

A few weeks later, when a “Shark Tank” email popped into her inbox she thought she was getting scammed.

“Why would someone from ‘Shark Tank’ reach out to me?” she thought and giggled.

But after a second look she realized the message was legitimate, and although she had planned to apply for the show until 2025, she decided to move it up.

“When ‘Shark Tank’ comes knocking, you answer,” she said.

In September, just mere weeks after launching Veba, the Brewsters flew out to California to meet with American businesswoman Lori Greiner, Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary (better known as Mr. Wonderful), American businessman Mark Cuban and guest shark Emma Grede, a British businesswoman and fashion designer who co-founded the denim company Good American.

“Shark Tank is the biggest platform for doing a business pitch so I felt a mixture of excitement and a ball of nerves,” Brewster said.

Ultimately, all of the Sharks said no in the episode that aired Friday, April 5, because they felt it was too early to invest. Still, Brewster said Veba benefited from the show.

Navigating entrepreneurship as a Jamaican woman at FIU

Since the episode aired, Brewster said the company has been receiving a lot more customer feedback. Some have asked them to introduce Veba to hospitals and other medical centers. Others have shared their personal horror stories with expired milk.

More importantly, the exposure has boosted sales, she said.

Brewster said she’s thankful to “Shark Tank” for the opportunity and to FIU’s culture for the support, which she said encouraged her to believe in herself.

“The university is really diverse so I’ve always felt welcomed, and like my opinions and thoughts really matter,” she said.

Brewster, who migrated from Jamaica to Miami at 7 years old, joined the about 20% that women make up of all inventors, and the 1.1% of Black inventors in the U.S., according to career site Zippia.

“The reality is that when I pitch my product, the people I’m pitching to never look like me, so there’s already a barrier there. On average, I get 5% of the capital that’s available to entrepreneurs, so my demographic tends to skew into the under-funded. And we know a lot of companies are now aware of that and they’re trying to fix it, but it’s a tough road. So having FIU helping to fund more minority-funded companies means a lot,” she added.

Brewster hopes to get more training and networking at StartUP FIU, a hub at the university that opened in 2016 and fosters entrepreneurship among faculty and students, to get capital money.

Robert Hacker, the co-founder and the director of StartUP FIU, described Brewster as an intelligent and impressive woman.

“We help everyone who comes to us,” he said. “We’re supportive of everybody who wants to pursue ventures. From the first day we started, I told the entire team, ‘If you’re asked to do something, the answer is ‘yes’ and then we’ll figure out how to do it.”

Brewster said she’s excited to keep growing Veba as a business. But she remains most excited to help families — including her own, as she’s expecting twin girls due in September.