They might appear like the quintessential Silicon Valley power couple, but technology entrepreneurs Matteo Franceschetti and Alexandra Zatarain don’t prescribe to the toxicity of hustle culture.
“Health is based on three pillars,” Matteo Franceschetti tells me. “Sleep, nutrition, and fitness; but the reality is that sleep comes first. If you are only sleeping two hours a night, you will not go to the gym, you do not have the energy, you do not have the mental bandwidth. Sleep is really the foundation.”
As one of the masterminds behind bed-tech unicorn Eight Sleep, Franceschetti is serious about slumber. In fact, his approach to performance and personal optimisation borders on the obsessive. A decorated multi-sport athlete in his home country of Italy, Franceschetti has spent the better of two decades trying to get the best out of his body. From ketogenic diets and heart rate monitors to new fangled fitness routines and Peloton bikes, the entrepreneur has tried it all. Now, he’s sharing his findings.
“Over the past probably five, six years, sleep has become a hot topic. While instead, 20 years ago it was not,” he says. “In the past, the macho guy didn’t have to sleep, but now, sleep deprivation is the new smoking.”
Franceschetti, alongside wife and business partner Alexandra Zatarain, form part of the new vanguard of tech entrepreneurs. Less concerned with the frivolity of spontaneous indulgence, this crop of enterprising, articulate and suspiciously good-looking founders is focused on the long game. And for good reason.
As the Eight Sleep figureheads explain when I catch up with them in Sydney, longevity is no longer just a buzz word for supplement salesmen and marketers; it’s a booming billion dollar business.
Originally founded in 2014, Eight Sleep is a business that embodies the very essence of modern wellness. Where the fitness sector has largely centred around diet and exercise, the unique enterprise places its emphasis on the foundations, aiming to tackle health at the source. For Franceschetti, Eight Sleep offered a rare extension to his already burgeoning passion for longevity.
“I was always in performance and recovery, but around 10 years ago, I started wondering why, if Elon Musk had the technology to take me to Mars, I still spent a third of my life on a piece of dumb foam? Our life is so busy and then you go to bed, you pretend to fall asleep and wake up refreshed. That doesn’t make any sense. That is when we started looking at this.”
“The first product was a mattress cover that would track your sleep and it was very successful,” Franceschetti continues. “We sold 8,000 units in pre-orders and the business was growing, but every time I spoke to customers, they would ask, “Oh, this is really cool, but does it also heat and cool?” So I immediately saw that kind of product-market fit.”
The consumer interest sparked a new concept for Eight Sleep, prompting Franceschetti and his co-founders to create the Pod—the ‘first bed in the world’ to utilise advanced cooling and heating technology to improve sleep. Released in 2019, the original Pod featured a malleable active grid technology that regulated temperature on either side of the mattress, alongside a hub that worked as the product’s proprietary thermal engine. Sitting beside the bed, the hub’s AI-enabled system ‘sensed’ sleep patterns to automatically adjust temperatures.
The major benefit of this, Franceschetti explains, was improved sleep depth. The Eight Sleep co-founder reveals that unless you have a real medical disorder, temperature is the biggest factor impacting your sleep quality.
“The reason for that is that your body temperature changes at night—it’s called circadian cycle,” Franceschetti says. “As soon as you fall asleep, your body temperature should drop and then a couple of hours before you wake up, it should start rising.”
“With the Eight Sleep Pod, we’re not reinventing the wheel, we actually just simply help your body to be more efficient and effective at doing what nature wants the body to do. That is why you gain so much sleep because we just nudge your body and enhance it doing these temperature changes.”
“Wearables may track your sleep but they don’t actually improve it. We see a lot of our customers—80 per cent have a wearable—so they have already been educated about the importance of sleep, but there is no one improving it for them and that is it.”
Pod 4 Ultra
This year, Franceschetti and Zatarain took things to a new level, introducing the Pod 4 Ultra. Described as the brand’s most innovative product to date, the latest development introduces a smarter hub and frame that work in tandem to dramatically improve sleep analysis and cooling. You can even adjust the elevation of the mattress, which Zatarain says can improve snoring.
From there, the Pod 4 Ultra can change temperature 30 to 50 times per side per night, making micro adjustments based on body position, health metrics and vibration. If you start tossing and turning more than normal or the temperature in your bedroom changes, the smart hub will adjust measures in real-time.
“That is what I always say is the real value of what we do—intelligence,” Zatarain says. “There are sensors running across the chest area of the bed that run connected to the computer and then that gets streamed to the cloud and then it all gets processed and how it ends with the magic happens.”
“The interesting thing is also clinical studies have proven that in deep sleep, you need a colder temperature—that is how you maximize that,” Franceschetti adds. “While instead in REM (Rapid eye movement), you need a temperature that is neutral because your brain deactivates a lot of functions because you’re usually dreaming and it doesn’t let you get into REM if the brain believes that you could die because it’s too hot or too cold. That is why a neutral temperature is so important in that phase.”
Future of Eight Sleep
Pod 4 Ultra, for all its bells and whistles, is merely one link in Franceschetti and Zatarain’s remarkable chain. Now a decade into their journey, the Eight Sleep co-founders are reaping the rewards of a good night’s sleep and what’s more, they have big plans on the horizon. The co-founders have already outlined ambitions to tackle sleep apnea, mitigate snoring compilations and even broach cardiovascular diseases, pending FDA-approval.
“The sensors that we have on the bed are fascinating in how they work because we describe it like it’s mostly a stethoscope,” Zatarain says. “Imagine that a doctor is listening to your chest and all of these vibrations that are created inside of our bodies while things are happening, and that’s picked up by these sensors. We have these algorithms that are saying, well, from these sounds, this frequency is like a heart rate, this is movement, this is respiration.”
“While we may not be able to diagnose you, when customers have been sleeping on the pod for years, they can very clearly see when something’s off,” she continues. “We nudge you when there’s something strange—your heart rate’s dropping later in the night than it should or your HRV (Heart rate variability) is not looking good—but when you have so many years of data as a user, that’s very powerful.”
Sleep Disruptors
In a broad sense, the wellness space has become technology’s true testing ground; a place where scientists, physiologists and engineers come together to toy with the idea of human performance. What started as fad diets and workout routines has evolved into genetic testing and micro-particle research, with terms like ‘bio-hacking’ becoming so ubiquitous that they appear to have lost all meaning. It’s a notion that Zatarain, quite rightly, rejects. As she explains, when Eight Sleep started, there was no trend to jump on.
“The biggest challenge for us was simply that we were building in a new category, a new space,” she tells me. “When we started, our first product was not doing microclimate control and no one was searching for adding a smart mattress cover to your bed. So you really are building your own space and you have to raise awareness about why this is important and how it works. That’s a big challenge for anyone that’s carving their own niche.”
While the pair remain coy about their market valuation, reports have Eight Sleep nearing the USD$500 million mark. In 2021, the business secured $86 million in a Series C round of funding and interest has only swelled since then. With growth in Australia already earmarked for the next decade, you can expect to see the business continue to boom, and therein lies the secret.
Admittedly, sleep and disruption are two words you’d traditionally like to keep apart, but for Franceschetti and Zatarain, they take the moniker as a badge of honour. When I ask if they believe they consider themselves category disruptors, the answer is a resounding ‘Yes’.
“Absolutely— both from how we think about sleep as a company and a brand,” Zatarain says. “Even from that perspective, we’ve been quite disruptive in this space and how almost every other company in sleep is talking about sleep versus how we are. Then, of course, with our technology, our focus is on innovation for sleep improvement, and I don’t think there’s really any other company that’s doing that.”
“We always say, ‘Sleep is a means to an end’,” she continues. “We’re not the type of company that’s going to push you to spend 12 hours in bed and be lazy on a Sunday. That’s not it. Our perspective is that you should sleep well because you want to feel well when you wake up. You want to live your life, you want to do things, you want to be in a good mood, you want to be sharp, you want to live longer—that’s what we’re looking for.”
