Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, on VatorNews podcast

Eight Sleep sells a smart mattress, which can monitor vital signs while people sleep

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, a company that sells a smart mattress, which can monitor vital signs while people sleep.

Eight Sleep has two products: a smart mattress, and a cover that includes its technology, and which can be placed over an existing mattress. The technology can monitor vitals such as respiratory rate, resting heart rate, and HRV during sleep and then display that information in the Eight Sleep App called SleepOS, which will then notify users when there are changes in the usual patterns of these biometrics.

The company recently raised an $86 million round of funding, bring its total to over $150 million in total funding for a valuation of nearly $500 million.

Our overall goal with these podcasts is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, treat and measure progress and outcomes. How we’re empowering the consumer. Whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down? And how tech advancements change the role of the doctor.

Highlights from the interview:

• Franceschetti was previously a tennis player as a teenager before becoming an entrepreneur, where he was looking for efficiency, which led him to start looking into his sleep. He came to the conclusion that technology can improve sleep performance and help people recover faster. The vision of Eight Sleep is based on compressing sleep, and to save people's lives. 
• Eight Sleep's products change the temperature of a person's body during the night, which helps people fall asleep faster, get deeper sleep, get more REM, and wake up and toss and turn less during the night. The products also have embedded sensors, so they can measure heart rate, respiration, and sleep quality without the user wearing or charging anything. 
• One of the company's big advantages is that it doesn't ask users to change any of their behavior; they go to bed the same way they always have, but now they will fall asleep faster, get better sleep, and will also have data about their well-being.
• The temperature will automatically change during the night; Eight Sleep has developed a machine learning model that will adjust the temperature based on the weather and the user's own biometrics called Temperature Autopilot. It will adjust in real-time to maximize sleep performance, and the ML also learns from how the user slept based on the changes in temperature. 
• Health is based on three pillars: sleep, fitness, and nutrition, with sleep being the foundational piece because too little sleep means there's no fitness or nutrition. You will start craving junk food and you won't have the energy to train. You can die if you are extremely sleep deprived. Sleep also has an impact on blood pressure, on heart rate, and overall health. 
• The company plans to add features over time that will be connected to a subscription, though there will be a free option, meaning users can still buy the device and get the manual temperature control and the sleep data, but the intelligence and content will eventually require a subscription. 
• Eight Sleep doesn't send data to doctors at this point, but it is working on ways to notify the user if their biometrics are off compared to their baseline. It has no plans to become a medical-grade device, which would mean going through FDA clearance, so it isn't able to diagnose its users, only notify them if there's a change.
• While the devices are only direct-to-consumer at the moment, there are plans to sell the devices through health plans, as well as corporate wellness programs; however, there aren't any agreements on that yet.
• Franceschetti sees sleep deprivation as the new smoking. Sleep is also becoming the new fitness, which was more important in the 90s; more people take care of their fitness and nutrition and now, finally, they are taking care of their sleep as well. 

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