Luke Kelly, CEO of Bryte, on VatorNews podcast

Bryte is an AI-powered restorative sleep technology company

Steven Loeb and Bambi Francisco Roizen speak with Luke Kelly, CEO of Bryte, an AI-powered restorative sleep technology company. 

Our goal is to understand how technology is radically changing healthcare: the way we screen, treat and measure progress and outcomes. Whether tech is helping or hurting our well-being physically and mentally. And whether we’re creating productivity that drives economic costs down while improving are overall health.

Highlights from the interview:

• The bedding industry has really been defined by spring and foam, with the first memory foams being developed in the 1960s. The main innovation has been in the logistics and supply chain around packaging, like beds in a box, over the last decade or so, but there haven't actually significant huge leaps forward in terms of radical, new innovation within that industry. What Kelly was able to bring to Bryte, which he joined in January, is experience from the footwear industry, where he introduced new technology into a market that was really ripe for disruption.
• Our relationship with sleep 10 years ago was dramatically different than what it is today. Back then, people bragged about how little sleep they were surviving on; it was a badge of honor to say you only got four or five hours of sleep. Getting a good night's sleep is not just a pillar of health, but it's really the foundation of health. Technology has contributed to that, as people are wearing their Whoop or Apple Watch and they're tracking their sleep; there's a much higher awareness of sleep quality than there's ever been. 
• Sleep is highly individualized and so what Bryte has both hardware and software, along with experiences, to help create an individualized sleep experience. The company uses behavioral sleep coaching to help create habits that make a big difference. Getting to sleep at a consistent time every night makes a big difference, and building routines that include mindfulness and meditation can really help, so Bryte has a relaxation feature that does a full body scan, which it can synchronize with sound, to help people sleep.
• There are 16 different zones in the bed, independently controllable on each side, so that each partner has their own base level of firmness. Users do a restorative sleep questionnaire to establish a baseline and a recommendation based on both demographic and their sleep quality data as a starting point, to determine the firmness and plushness setting that should work best for them. to get a high quality of sleep.
• The bed makes adjustments during the night intuitively, using AI and machine learning. Depending on the individual, the bed can be adjusted anywhere from over 100 times a night. Bryte sees improvement over time as people stay in bed and have the experience longer so it can make fewer adjustments.
• Bryte is not trying to address medical problems. This is, at its core, still a consumer product with the goal of generally improving wellness and sleep quality. Its core technology probably has applications with medical products in the future, and those are some things that it has had discussions about, but the core consumer product is not a medical product.
• The company sells into the hospitality industry, which is an opportunity for Bryte to create an initial relationship with the consumer. Oftentimes, people spend 20 to 40 minutes picking a mattress but they might spend a week in a hotel, so it's way better to actually sleep on the product in a hotel, in an environment that’s designed for sleep and restoration. So, there’s a very symbiotic relationship between the hospitality industry and the consumer experience.

Thank you to our sponsors: Advsr; a boutique M&A advisory firm. They wrote the book on startup M&A called "Magic Box Paradigm: A framework for startup acquisitions." Go to Amazon.com to get your copy. Also thanks to Stratpoint, an outsourced engineering firm and Scrubbed, an online bookkeeping firm. If you need affordable and quality engineering and bookkeeping, check them out. We highly recommend them!

Subscribe to our podcasts to get our interviews and shows as soon as they're published!