Sleep tracking company Eight (formerly known as Luna) raised $6 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Yunqui Partners, Azure Capital, Cota Capital, Comcast Ventures, Vast Ventures, Stanford University, Galvanize Ventures, Idea Bulb VC, and Scribd co-founder Jared Friedman.
“The conception of Eight began with my own sleep problems,” Eight Cofounder and CEO Matteo Franceschetti told MobiHealthNews in an email. “I’ve been struggling to sleep well for many years, and had tried different wearable and app sleep trackers to try and find out what my sleep patterns are and why I wasn’t sleeping well, but none of these options worked. They have many deficiencies: they must be worn, charged, placed in the bed, you must remember to wear them or place them each night and while they tell you how to sleep, they don’t yield accurate data.”
He decided that he wanted to build a device that suited his needs — one that he said would personalize sleep tracking for each user. Franceschetti said he changed the company's name from Luna because it is widely used in the sleep industry. The new name, Franceschetti said, is a play on the average number of hours of sleep recommended per night.
Eight has developed a mattress pad that aims to help a user track and improve their sleep. The cover tracks a user’s usual bedtime, the time the user falls asleep, the time the user normally wakes up, user movement, heart rate, breathing rate, hours slept, and the time the user got out of bed. It also tracks and factors in environmental data like room temperature, humidity, light levels, noise levels, and the local weather.
Based on the info it collects, a companion app will provide users with a sleep score, data on the number of hours slept, sleep debt trends, and data on how much deep sleep the user received. The mattress cover also offers ten different temperature settings that can be adjusted on either side of the bed if the user is sleeping with a partner.
The system, which costs between $249 and $289 depending on bed size, is available for preorder on Eight’s website.
Last year, in January, Eight launched a crowdfunding campaign for its mattress cover. The campaign ended up raising $1.2 million, significantly more than its $400,000 goal. Though the campaign ended in March 2015, none of the orders have been fulfilled yet, but Franceschetti said they plan to start shipping the device in the spring of this year.
Some of the funds from this venture round, Franceschetti said, will be used to fulfill its preorders. Eight will also use the funds to develop and release software-based features, like individualized sleep coaching programs
