Eight, an Internet of Things company focused on improving the way people sleep, is making strides in the Mattress 2.0 movement. Today, the company announced the close of its $11 million Series A.
The latest round comes from a myriad of investors, including Yunqi Partners, Azure Capital, Y Combinator, Stanford StartX fund, Comcast Ventures, and Sinovation Ventures. The company, founded in 2014 by Matteo Francheschetti, Alexandra Zatarain, Andrea Ballarini and Massimo Andreasi Bassi plans on using the new funding for continued R&D, as well as expanding its line of products.
“Our goal is to personalize and improve each night for everybody, changing the way people sleep forever and for better,” said Eight CEO Matteo Franceschetti. “We will continue to leverage technology, detailed design, and proven science and data in our pursuit of this goal, in the hopes that our company will be recognized as the leader in sleep innovation.”
The company’s IoT technology integrates an ultra-comfortable mattress with an app that senses and analyzes your sleep patterns and bedroom environment. These insights are then used to determine your ideal sleep temperature, which you can control from your smartphone. The Eight app even provides feedback to users on each night of sleep and allows for further integrations with other in-home smart products like lights or door locks.
Yesterday, the company also opened its first New York showroom, where customers can get a feel for the smart bedroom experience firsthand. The physical brick and mortar location follows suit of similar mattress companies, such as Casper and Helix, who have also opened showrooms throughout the city.
Beyond the direct-to-consumer model that’s been popular among these next-generation mattress upstarts, Eight sets itself apart through its emphasis on technological innovation.
“When we design a product, we do it based on proven science and data analysis,” said Franceschetti. “Our first product was a technology product, because we believe that if we don't know how we sleep, we can't work on improving it. When we designed our mattress we did so by analyzing over 1.8 million hours of sleep data and identifying which mattress specs would give our customers better sleep. We are engineering better sleep.”
Photos via Eight.
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