Nikolaus Potapow and Christoph Konheisner are the founders of Datum, an Austrian coffee startup rethinking the espresso machine as a connected system. Coffee has been central to their lives for the past ten years, both in their professional lives as industrial designers and their personal lives as home baristas. Their friends kept asking, “What machine makes better coffee than a fully automatic without the complexity of a fully manual machine?” They never had a satisfying answer. Datum became their answer: an ultra-compact machine with an integrated tamper, redefined portafilter, and an open-recipe platform that brings products, people, and coffee knowledge together.

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For the past 10 years, coffee has been a central part of our lives.

Knowing about this passion, our friends and family kept asking the same question: what kind of coffee machine should I get? It needed to make better coffee than their fully automatic or capsule machines but still be easy to use at home. We never had a satisfying answer. In early 2024, after both of us had lived and worked in different parts of Europe, we reunited and decided to develop our own answer.

Rather than starting with a machine, we started with people. We looked at the entire coffee journey, speaking with home users, specialty roasters, retailers, technicians and coffee professionals to understand where frustration, waste, and complexity actually arise. Diving deep into everyday workflows (not just technical specifications) shaped almost every design decision that eventually became Datum.

The more people we spoke to, the more our initial assumption proved correct. The problem wasn’t a lack of capable coffee machines; it was a lack of the knowledge needed to use them. This knowledge remained disconnected from the product itself. That realization fundamentally shaped Datum. Instead of designing just another espresso machine, we began designing a connected system that brings products, people, and coffee knowledge together.

While we were still in school together, a friend of ours suggested teaming up and building an espresso machine as an engineering project, and we actually made that work. That friend went into architecture, but we both stuck with coffee machines.

After studying industrial design and smart-embedded systems, we worked at a number of established manufacturers and studios. At some point, it became clear that if we wanted to drive more fundamental change in the coffee industry, we had to start ourselves.

Being a founder team of industrial designers shapes everything we do today. We always think about the user experience first, whether we’re designing hardware or software. We see this priority reflected and validated in the positive responses we get when people actually try Datum hands on. Moreover, our commitment to user experience means that iterative processes are at the core of everything we do.

From the very outset, it was clear to us that Datum should have an ultra-compact footprint, fitting even small kitchen countertops. This is especially important as living spaces continue to shrink in urban environments.

We started by defining a very rough component package and building full-scale mock-ups to evaluate proportions, ergonomics, and handling. Looking back, it’s almost surprising how close the final product is to those first models. Even after redesigning major components—including completely rethinking the brew group several times—we managed to stay remarkably close to that original footprint.

The compact footprint forced us to question every component and every interaction. One example is the tamper. Rather than having it take up additional space on the countertop as a separate tool, we integrated it directly into the brew head, where it automatically tamps the coffee before brewing. This saves space and allows for a more seamless user flow.

Stepping into the portafilter market means entering a category dominated by heavy chrome, exposed mechanics, and iconic E61 brew groups. (The portafilter is the component into which you put freshly ground coffee and then insert it into the espresso machine.) For decades, these elements have become symbols of quality and craftsmanship, even though they also represent products that consume large amounts of energy, occupy significant space, and often feel intimidating to many people.

We have a lot of respect for that heritage; it shaped specialty coffee for decades. But from the beginning, we felt there was room for a different interpretation, one that feels calmer, more approachable, and more at home in today’s living spaces. It’s not about replacing one aesthetic with another but broadening what an espresso machine can be.

With our design, we dared to take a contemporary, much quieter, much less ostentatious approach. Rather than expressing precision through visible mechanics, the devices quietly, almost magically, support the sensual act of making espresso with a few intentionally designed touch points.

We think there’s already enough visual and digital noise in everyday life; a coffee machine doesn’t need to add to it. Instead, Datum gently blends into people’s living spaces, letting the ritual of making coffee take center stage.

With Datum, we wanted to rethink the entire brewing experience, so we started questioning every part of traditional portafilter machines, including the portafilter itself. It’s design has remained pretty much unchanged since the beginning of espresso making in the late 19th century.

Since then, the devices got much smaller, but the mechanics didn’t change. However, to us, locking a traditional portafilter with a bayonet mechanism and big handle into a small espresso machine always felt like you were tipping over the entire product. Additionally, traditional designs—usually made from heavy-weight cast metal— take a long time to heat up or otherwise noticeably cool down the espresso.

With Datum, we entirely redefined the portafilter, leaving out the handle and the heavy metal in order to replace it with a thin, precision-machined stainless steel basket with an insulating grip on the outside. It elegantly slides into our brew head and snaps into place magnetically. It also allows for a heat-up time of only a few seconds and perfectly combines with our integrated tamping mechanism.

So, on the outside, it might just look like we left-out the handle, but in reality, it’s a wholly different brewing experience.

Frankly speaking, we haven't had one yet. Fingers crossed. :)

Building a hardware startup certainly comes with plenty of difficult moments, but so far we’ve never reached a point where we genuinely thought we’d have to give up. Maybe that’s because we’ve always taken an iterative approach—one step at a time. Hopefully, we’ll still be able to give the same answer a few years from now.

We admire products where advanced technology quietly disappears behind a calm, intuitive experience. Apple has demonstrated this remarkably well over the years, and that idea strongly influenced how we approached Datum. We believe complexity should live inside the product, not in front of the user. The machine can automatically take care of the difficult parts of brewing yet still give experienced baristas full control over every parameter. Rather than choosing between automation and manual brewing, we wanted to design a system that comfortably supported both.

At the same time, brands like Nothing and Teenage Engineering inspire us through their confidence to challenge established product categories. Specialty coffee has grown enormously in recent years, and a younger generation is increasingly valuing craftsmanship, origin, and quality. Yet, many of the products available today still speak the visual language of professional café equipment or traditional luxury appliances.

We see an opportunity to rethink not only how coffee is prepared, but also how these products are designed, experienced, and communicated. Datum aims to bring a calmer, more contemporary perspective to the category, combining thoughtful industrial design, intuitive interaction, and an open ecosystem that makes specialty coffee more accessible without compromising its culture.

Right now, we’re still refining Datum. A few important steps remain before we can bring it to a wider audience, but that’s exactly where we enjoy being most: visiting roasteries, meeting coffee enthusiasts, testing prototypes, collecting honest feedback, and continuously improving the product.

At the same time, we’re building our open recipe platform together with the community, gathering knowledge from roasters, baristas, and coffee lovers that will become part of the brewing experience itself.

As the project grows, we hope to keep approaching it the same way we always have: with curiosity, hands-on experimentation, and a willingness to challenge established conventions. We love when hardware and user experience come together so seamlessly that the technology almost disappears. That belief won’t change. We want to keep designing products that feel calm and approachable on the outside while quietly solving complex problems beneath the surface.

Austrian enamelware manufacturer Riess is a longtime favorite of ours, blending timeless design with a long tradition of high quality manufacturing and systemic sustainability.

Nikolaus: Hot take. My Magic Mouse from 2013, still such a powerful user interface!

Christoph: Pen and paper is faster than any computer.

Nikolaus: Florian Pfeffer, To do: Die neue Rolle der Gestaltung in einer veränderten Welt (Unfortunately only in German); Tools for the Design Revolution, Institute of Design Research Vienna.

Christoph: My thinking constantly changes. Pretty much every product, every user interaction, every learning changes my thinking a bit, so there’s no book to mention here.

Nikolaus: Spending at least a few minutes outside in nature.

Christoph: A few minutes of pure thinking.

Nikolaus: A series of beautiful photographs a friend captured when we last met.

Christoph: A t-shirt my mum gifted me from a coffee farm.

Nikolaus: Dare to go user-centric.

Christoph: Don’t listen to just one voice; listen to 100 voices.

Nikolaus: Flat white with oat milk, preferably from single origin Ethiopian beans.

Christoph: Nothing beats a good cappuccino.

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