At the end of the day, I think the big difference between Eight Sleep and the wearables is we don't stop at the data, but we start actually doing our job based on your data. So imagine that you have a sleep butler that, while you're unconscious, will do 30 to 100 changes in the middle of the night for you to maximize your sleep performance.
Welcome back to the Fit Insider podcast. I'm your host, Joe Vennare. [music] Today, I'm joined by Matteo Franceschetti, co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep. In this episode, we discuss how Eight Sleep has evolved from a temperature-regulated mattress cover into a global sleep fitness platform powered by AI. Matteo shares how the company's expanded across 35 countries, raised nearly $300 million in funding, and built one of the largest proprietary sleep data sets in the world, spanning billions of hours of sleep. Plus, we talk about the shift from sleep tracking to sleep intervention, how the Pod and Autopilot system actively optimize sleep in real time, and how the company is moving towards preventative health and early disease detection. Let's get into it.
The Fit Insider podcast is presented by EGYM Wellpass. Wellpass makes fitness more accessible. It connects employers with thousands of premier gyms and studios to subsidize access and lower barriers to participation for their team. Employers get a benefit employees actually use, while clubs and studios get more members without additional marketing costs or administrative work. To see how it works for both employers and fitness partners, visit egym-wellpass.com.
Hi Matteo, welcome back to Fit Insider. Thanks for joining us.
Of course, thank you for having me. Excited to be here.
Yeah, we were chatting offline a little bit, and as this was getting scheduled, it's been — if you can believe it, I couldn't — six years almost since we talked last, and quite a lot has changed, not only, I'm sure, at Eight Sleep, but across, as we can think about the industry, from how people even think about sleep and health tracking all the way to AI and all the, you know, kind of predictive health things that are going on. But maybe from the top, just to kick things off. Yeah, what's kind of latest top of mind for you at Eight Sleep? What's the update, and then we'll dive in deeper?
Yeah, of course. I mean, many things changed over the past six years. We grew a lot. The company is now selling in 35 countries, including China. So we cover United States, Canada, UK, Europe, Middle East, Australia, Mexico, China. And probably over the next six to nine months we'll cover the rest of the world. So we became a truly global company. We have offices obviously all over the US — New York, San Francisco, Boston — but also China. And now we also have an office in Europe, in Milan. So we have a team there, too. The company raised almost 300 million over time. And we collected billions of hours of sleep. So we're becoming one of the most knowledgeable companies in the world at sleep, with so many customers across the globe.
Yeah, it's been really incredible to see this evolution from, you know, just people thinking about, even starting to think about sleep tracking initially, you kind of introducing and mainstreaming this idea of sleep fitness, sleep optimization, really taking it to another level in terms of what you're able to track and then how the technology is able to kind of improve sleep. Is that still kind of like the core focus? Temperature regulation, sleep optimization? Where are things from like a maybe technology or positioning standpoint?
Well, yeah. When we spoke back then, obviously the focus was more just probably on temperature. And so we have this unique technology that we invented that is called Autopilot, which is an AI engine that is on your biometrics. We dynamically adjust the temperature of your body while you're asleep to maximize your sleep performance, so you can get up to 30% better sleep and better deep sleep. You fall asleep faster, less interruptions. Then since then we introduced a lot of other products on top of the Pod. The Pod is a mattress cover that you can install on top of any mattress. It will improve your sleep by changing your body temperature. Then we launched a smart base that comes with the Pod, and so whenever we detect your snoring, we can elevate your head, so we will mitigate snoring.
Then we introduced a thermo-regulated blanket and a thermo-regulated pillow cover. And so now you can have temperature around your head, on top of your body, and underneath your body with the Pod, and that gives you even a stronger thermal benefit for your sleep enhancement. At the end of the day, I think the big difference between Eight Sleep and the wearables is we don't stop at the data, but we start actually doing our job based on your data. So imagine that you have a sleep butler that, while you're unconscious, will do 30 to 100 changes in the middle of the night for you to maximize your sleep performance.
The other big thing since then is the caliber of people that today sleep on the products. Now we have Elon Musk, that is public, Mark Zuckerberg. We have shaikhs, prime ministers. We have all the top athletes from Formula 1, the number one tennis player in the world, the number one tennis paddle player in the world. We work with the Broncos, 49ers, soccer teams, UAE teams. So Pogačar, the guy who won the Tour de France last year, installed our product in every single hotel in each stage, just because he's so aware of how much faster he can recover with our product.
Yeah, there's two things I definitely want to talk about there. We'll take the first one. Just in terms of wearables, the idea of tracking anything — sleep, activity, you name it. But then the kind of issue or next hurdle that we're encountering across biometrics and devices is, okay, but what do we do with this information? And there's so much being made of, and there's going to be an AI coach for that, there's going to be a summary of this, you're going to have this kind of personalized N-of-1 interventions, but then you still have to do the thing that it's telling you to do. In your case, you're talking about, hey, we're proactively and almost on autopilot — and hence the name — doing these things.
Is that even something, you know, separating yourself from the technology and the format and all those things, totally differentiated across the category and evolving kind of how we think about sleep tracking, so to speak, like an actual, as you said, butler, but like interventions built in?
Yeah. So our whole obsession at Eight Sleep is all about, you know, closing the loop and these interventions — so the ability to respond to your needs. I think we at Eight Sleep are doing a really good job at educating customers so much about the importance of sleep, the key matters as well as sleep and all of their activity. But if you talk to customers, if you talk to your friends, everybody will say, yeah, but after a little bit I know now my metrics. So how do I really improve my HRV? How do I improve my heart rate at rest? How do I improve this, this, and that?
And so the obsession of Eight Sleep since when we started the company 10 years ago is the ability to respond. And I think there are different ways to respond to that. One is mechanical, which is temperature, there's elevation, and in the future there will be other forms of responses. You can think of light, noise, oxygen — everything we have always disclosed as part of our roadmap. So that is the sleep butler. But then there will be other forms of responses, and so you should start thinking about — we launched a line of supplements that can help you with your sleep, and over time there could be other forms of supplements, peptides, and drugs that could be relevant for you based on your biometrics. But at the end of the day, I think customers pay us to do the job for them, not just to report the data. Reporting data is a condition, but it's not sufficient. What they want is the ability to do the work for them.
And how much of this is coming — as you mentioned, you're collecting billions of hours of sleep data, you're able to kind of say, oh, combine the — you know, yes, what you have is a sense of where you want the product roadmap to go, but looking at customer data and then talking to customers and then triangulating these things to say, obviously, we should launch the pillow, blanket, the supplements, XYZ things that are the interventions, the job to be done, so to speak, in the sleep space?
Yeah, obviously we have a vision, then we have a clinical team, and we combine the two, and that is how most of the times we decide how we come up with new products. And then once you have taken the decision, you work with the customers to really fine-tune the things. But sometimes, you know, if you go back to the famous quote of Henry Ford, if you would ask the people what they want, they would say faster horses. So it's our job to innovate because we understand technology sometimes better than some of our customers, and so it's up to us to come up with an idea of what we can do, and then we can refine that technology or that feature with them.
But I always tell my team the big jump from zero to 80%, to the big innovation, needs to come from us, and then once we have a feature, you can fine-tune the feature with the customers. And then we have this crazy vision of all the other things that we can build to keep optimizing your sleep and your health. And also how we can become way more sophisticated at scanning your body while you're asleep, because we have a lot of space and you're standing still for eight hours every single night. So is there a way for us to go well beyond what the wearables can do by leveraging our space and the time that we have with you every single day?
Yeah, this was something that I think, you know, maybe when we initially chatted, I don't know if it came up on the podcast, but it certainly came up very early on in kind of the vision of the company was, hey, could we do full-body scanning, cancer detection, diagnostics, all those things while you were sleeping? You already mentioned shaping the environment, having different proactive interventions to optimize sleep, then talking about health more broadly. Like, how much of a push is that in terms of — well, one, when you're going out and raising the most recent rounds of funding, or thinking about the teams and allocating resources, like, is that a big focus now, or is that still kind of like, hey, maybe someday we'll be able to get to it?
We can break it down into pieces. So one, the Pod, the current technology is becoming a medical-grade device as we speak. We already filed for FDA approval in the US. Sleep apnea would be a big focus, but even when you look at our data, particularly in terms of cardiovascular topics, we have an accuracy that is very comparable to the one of a medical-grade EKG. And so you can really trust our data in terms of heart rate and HRV. And in the back end, we already see certain cardiovascular diseases — maybe we cannot disclose them yet because we are not FDA approved — but we're literally transforming your bed with our technology into the most sophisticated health platform you ever had in your house. You're sleeping on a stethoscope that is empowered by AI.
And so sleep apnea is a big topic, cardiovascular diseases another topic, and then we developed a model that is able to detect up to 230 diseases based on your sleep data. And so you should imagine that technologies like ours will be able to have a certain degree — a very high accuracy — at predicting diabetes, hypertension, and many other diseases that you can develop over time. And so this is one thing, with what we have today. So this is already true today at Eight Sleep. Then tomorrow, we're also working on new technologies for body scanning or thermal imaging. And so things that we can do because of our unique form factor and the eight hours that we have with you standing still every single night. And so both these two parts are happening. Obviously the timeline for each of them is different. The first one is very fast and it's already true. The second is already true in terms of product development.
Thinking about that, you mentioned just kind of the caliber of people and athletes, entrepreneurs, politicians, leaders, all those things that are using the product since the beginning and even today. Eight Sleep feels like a kind of luxury, certainly premium, but very high-end brand. A focus on the optimization obviously lends itself to anybody that wants to get whatever the percent degree better every day, they're certainly going to gravitate towards it. And you all have been incredibly successful at kind of helping move sleep into the mainstream wellness performance conversation, where you don't have to convince the individuals that you're talking about that sleep is important. It's like, they know. And so, how do you see, or do you intend to maybe make this more of a mass market? Is there a kind of roadmap or goal in terms of how you want to roll out across the different cohorts? How do you think about that kind of just expanding beyond that kind of maybe entry point?
If you think of us like the Tesla of sleep, we are probably the Model S. You should imagine there will be, you know, the Model X and Y and 3 coming. The idea is to democratize sleep enhancement as much as we can over time. Then at the same time, as we're obsessing in building the best possible product, so we don't want to take shortcuts and it's not that we are about price competition. I think price competition is for losers. We know — if you look at Peter Thiel, it's not even just my opinion. And so we are the most premium brand. We work with the best people in the world. We work with Aston Martin. We work with Charles Leclerc. And so the positioning is more similar to what Apple has been able to do over the years. Then again, we want to democratize the product. I think if our product was $199, probably we already have billions of customers instead of millions, but technology also requires some time to get there.
And like I said, I think this maybe education piece, where going out and trying to maybe convince somebody or build education, all the go-to-market around it, versus going to people who are already looking for the edge, for the next thing, for the technology, for the innovation, and proving it works with them. We've talked about it so many different times on this podcast and, you know, some of the content we put out, that this kind of trickle down from the elite — obviously Nikes of the world have run this playbook, and as you mentioned, that kind of Tesla bringing the innovation out broadly — like, you are proving at the highest, you know, ends of performance that it works. So naturally, as the technology evolution rolls out more broadly, certainly it'll be adopted by, you know, those individuals versus starting there and trying to move in a different direction.
The key is to democratize what we do. The audience, obviously the big names that you see are obviously big names and because they're aspirational, but our audience is still very normal people, right? You have the doctor and the mom. Particularly women's health is a very big topic for us. Lately we are seeing a lot of success with women going through menopause, women going through pregnancy. That is why we launched a mode that is what we call Hot Flash Mode. So if you have a hot flash, it will be able to respond very quickly to cool you down. Pregnancy — we launched what is called Pregnancy Mode. And so your metrics and the temperature and everything the sleep butler does for you adjust every single trimester.
And so we see all these different audiences, and the ability to respond to their needs is what they really love, because we reach a scale where one solution doesn't fit everybody anymore at our scale. And so you really start becoming very focused on different large niches with specific problems.
One of the other things, much like the kind of body scanning, imaging, preventative health of that nature, was this idea of compressing sleep — that if you're able to kind of optimize sleep in such a way where it's more deep sleep, it's more restorative, all those things, that eventually, is it possible to compress the amount of sleep that you need? Is that still something that's top of mind or on the roadmap?
To a pretty good degree, we're already doing it, right? Because we help people fall asleep faster. We reduce the number of interruptions in the middle of the night. And so, yeah, maybe we didn't compress it from eight to six hours yet — that is not the direction we are going for — but we already compressed meaningfully the time that you need to sleep because we make your sleep more efficient. And so the ROI per hour that you get from your sleep because of our product is much bigger.
And the other interesting thing we see, and we will publish clinical studies about that, is also the impact that we have just by sleeping on the Pod, how much we improve your cardiovascular system, and how much we'll reduce the risk of you developing certain diseases. And so the ROI of sleeping on our Pod is not even just the sleep ROI, but there is also a health and longevity ROI that you get passively just by using the product.
This episode of the Fit Insider podcast is brought to you by EGYM Wellpass. Wellpass is corporate wellness that actually drives movement. It connects employers to a large network of premier gyms and studios, helping subsidize access and make it easier for employees to participate. For employers, that means a benefit people will actually use and habits that they stick to over time. And for fitness operators, it means more members coming in consistently without extra work. To see how Wellpass supports employers and fitness partners, visit egym-wellpass.com.
You know, even talking about the collection of this dataset, the kind of biomarkers and things that you're probably already identifying that, like you said, you can't necessarily reveal and certainly can't make diagnostic claims about, but there are these underlying health signals and there is the proprietary dataset. Like, how do you think about it this way, or how would you answer this? Like, how much of the company's kind of future-looking plans depend on the dataset versus the hardware? Or are they totally symbiotic and they're like both equally as important?
Very cool, important. The way I really think is in the form of a pyramid. At the bottom, you have different devices that track as many things as possible about your health. And that is part of what we want to keep expanding in terms of sensors and capabilities. Then there is an AI layer that is the one that ingests all the information that is unique to us and unique about your health, and then it comes back with the recommendations. And the recommendations are things that the sleep butler — so the AI engine, our Autopilot — can do on its own if there are responses like mechanical responses, or there could be other things that could be suggested, like supplements and other things based on your specific needs.
But at the end of the day, everything goes back to closing the loop. So you need to have as much data as possible. You need to have the smartest sleep model ever built. And then based on this type of information we can respond or suggest other forms of responses.
