Smart mattress maker Eight Sleep just announced it raised $86 million in fresh funding. The Series C round was led by Valor Equity Partners, with participation from SoftBank, Khosla Ventures, Founders Fund and General Catalyst. This round bringing the NYC-based startup’s valuation to a reported $500 million, according to Forbes.
Eight Sleep publicly launched its first model, the Pod, back in 2019, which features things like dynamic temperature regulation, biometric tracking and smart home integrations. Since then, the company says it has served thousands of clients, and built a “cult-like” following among celebrities and pro athletes, including actor Kevin Hart and retired baseball player Alex Rodriguez.
At the end of the day, Eight Sleep doesn’t just want to make sleep more comfortable, though. It wants to make it more efficient, too, claiming that if users improved their “sleep efficiency” by 25 percent, they wouldn’t need the full recommended eight hours. So, it recently rolled out SleepOS, an operating system that acts as the “brains” of its mattresses, using data to personalize and adjust the Pod towards each user’s unique sleep needs.
Eight Sleep positions itself as a “sleep fitness” company as opposed to just another mattress company.
“Your overall health rests on three pillars: nutrition, exercise, and sleep,” co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti said in a recent blog post. “At Eight Sleep, we believe that it is time to change the conversation about sleep entirely. Sleep should be something that is prioritized, measured and worked on the same way nutrition and exercise are.”
And as concerns related to burnout, mental wellness and overall health continue to grow amid the pandemic, sleep has become an emerging market for tech companies to tackle. Sleep startup Proper raised $9.5 million from Snoop Dogg’s Casa Verde Capital about a year ago, and Bryte, another smart bed maker, raised $24 million in January. Meanwhile, EightSleep says its revenue this year is on track to more than triple from 2020. Antonio Gracias, the founder of Valor Equity Partners, seems to think this is just the beginning.
“The sleep tech market is only in its infancy. The opportunity is limitless, as we spend up to a third of our lives asleep. Consumers are increasingly focused on sleep fitness as the understanding of how deeply important sleep is to overall health becomes more widely known,” Gracias said in a statement. “Eight Sleep’s products and technology are disrupting the sleep market, and its rapid innovation is outpacing the competition as it builds a new sleep fitness focused category that delivers results.”
To keep up the momentum, Eight Sleep plans to use this fresh funding to further build out its product and expand its reach. It currently ships to the U.S. and Canada, and would like to be in more international markets by the end of 2021. Franceschetti also says the company plans to triple its headcount, with more than a dozen remote-friendly tech positions available now.
