The Founders Using AI To Help You Sleep
Eight Sleep's technology can keep you from running hot or cold while sleeping, and even spot illness early. But the sleep startup is still fighting to be appreciated as Main Street friendly.
The ‘aha moment’ for Eight Sleep customers, co-founder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti says, is often the first time they travel. Checking their Oura ring or Apple Watch later, they validate what they might already feel — when it comes to a good night’s sleep, there’s no place like home.
Upstarts home headquarters isn’t very high tech when it comes to sleep, at least yet — springing nearly $3,000 for a smart mattress cover and blanket system isn’t on our immediate bootstrapping roadmap. But speaking with Franceschetti from San Francisco, where Upstarts wraps up a quick trip to host our first Subscriber Meetup and interview Plaid onstage at the NYSE Tech Summit today, I don’t need to use too much imagination to picture such a scene.
As a Y Combinator alumni company that’s spread mostly by word of mouth over the past decade, it’s no surprise that Eight Sleep counts many startup founders and employees among its super fans. But as the company launched its flagship new product line, the Pod 5, this week, Upstarts was curious: how much is a trend toward prioritizing longevity and personal health among tech founders driving Eight Sleep’s growth? How far has the company come in breaking out of startup circles?
I asked Franceschetti those questions, then posed them to his co-founder and spouse, Alexandra Zatarain, over a Substack Live video chat on Wednesday. Their answers, including the full video playback of our Alex-to-Alex chat, is available for paid subscribers below.
Keeping score: Many of you wrote me after our Upstarts profile of AI note-taking tool Granola to share your experiences enjoying the product. And we aren’t alone: Granola announced a $43 million Series B funding round led by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross yesterday, alongside new team-friendly features that place it more squarely in a face-off with Notion, which recently announced its own note-taker.
CNBC and TechCrunch, meanwhile, confirmed our Upstarts scoop of Databricks acquiring database startup Neon for about $1 billion, a week-plus after Upstarts subscribers got the news. We will take healthy motivation from the fact that neither publication acknowledged Upstarts — as is so often the case with startup disruptors and legacy players. Our growing Upstarts community already knows better.