Angel Cups put safety first

Heart racing, Bennett Slosman stood before a live audience on April 17 at the Crowdfunded Pitch Night during the Tom Tom Festival, a weeklong celebration of music, art, and ideas held in Charlottesville, Virginia. He had three minutes to sell the crowd on a new product he and University of Richmond classmates Vasko Georgiev and William Johnston were developing. Their idea for Angel Detection Solutions, a business venture that will produce a disposable cup that detects when a date-rape drug is added to a drink, was selected as the audience favorite from among 11 finalists. The students won $2,000.

The Spider entrepreneurs racked up another win on May 22 when Angel Detection Solutions was again chosen as the audience favorite, this time during Product Fest, a daylong event hosted by the Richmond Technology Council in Richmond, Virginia.   

The idea for the drug-detecting cup originated in fall 2023 in Dr. Olivia Aronson’s Introduction to Entrepreneurship, a required class for non-business students minoring in entrepreneurship. Aronson, an associate professor of management, put Slosman, ’25, and Johnston, ’24, both leadership studies majors and entrepreneurship minors, in a group with Swiss exchange student Georgiev. Their charge: Develop an idea for a new product.

“There we were in the library in the middle of the night, drawing as many ideas as possible on a big white board,” Slosman said. “The second we brought up the idea for Angel Detection Solutions, we knew we had something. Since then, we have put hundreds, maybe thousands, of hours outside class into building a legitimate company that can make a difference.”    

When developing their product, the three classmates conducted countless interviews and surveys to determine consumer preferences and needs. They strategized regularly with Aronson and received weekly mentoring — including guidance on competition applications, pitch coaching, travel funding, and more — from the University’s Creativity, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIE) initiative staff. CIE staff also connected them to the Richmond-based product development firm SPARK for prototyping support.

“Convenience differentiates Angel Cups from our competitors,” explained Slosman, now chief executive officer of Angel Detection Solutions. “People don’t want to bring a makeshift chemistry lab to parties to test their drinks for drugs. Angel Cups will change color when someone slips date-rape drugs like GHB, Rohypnol, and ketamine into a drink. We want to nail these three drugs when we come to market.”

The budding entrepreneurs spent the last year working on the product name, brand, website, and legalities. Now Slosman is completing his Jepson School of Leadership Studies summer internship with the CIE incubator, where he is working to create functional prototypes of the cup. In the fall, he will participate in a CIE-supported research-and-development capstone designed to further Angel Detection Solutions' progress.

Although Johnston, who graduated from the University of Richmond in May, is no longer actively involved in the nascent venture, Georgiev, who graduated from the Université de Lausanne this month, heads up finances.

“In Switzerland, I didn’t get the kind of hands-on learning I experienced at Richmond,” Georgiev said. “Working on a real project that we took from scratch and built out kept me interested. My goal this summer is to set our budget, so we can reach out to investors.”

Slosman, too, is motivated by the hands-on learning and by the knowledge that the company is fully theirs. “Other universities with similar programs own a percentage of the idea,” he said. “Not at Richmond. Here, the entrepreneurs own the idea as well as the company that emerges from it.”

“I want us to grow a business that makes a difference,” he continued. “We are not going to give up. The Angel Cup is necessary, and we want to see it through.”