In the city that never sleeps, one company is betting people will shell out thousands to spend their nights on the same kind of bed that Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the NBA’s Jimmy Butler use.
While Eight Sleep is best known for making mattresses — crowdfunding its first project in 2014 with cash raised on Indiegogo — the brand describes itself more broadly as a “sleep fitness” company.
“Sleep deprivation is the new smoking,” CEO and co-founder Matteo Franceschetti told The Post of the cultural obsession with getting a good night’s rest.
“I think of sleep in the same way I think of working out,” Franceschetti added. “You need to be consistent, going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time and then the results will come. And that is how we came up with the concept of sleep fitness.”
Franceschetti believes its recently launched mattress topper, the Pod 4 Ultra can help it expand. Using sensors that scan your body, it detects when your body is too cold or too hot and changes temperature, via water-powered thermal technology, to enhance the sleep cycle. You can set an alarm to have the bed silently vibrate to wake you up.
It even detects when you’re snoring and the pod cover elevates to change your sleeping position and, ideally, make you stop sawing logs.
The topper also collects data on your resting heart rate and how much deep sleep you get a night, then suggests tips like the ideal bedtime via an app.
You can also use the app to change position and temperature manually, or simply tap the side of your bed.
And while the Pod 4 Ultra’s price tag of $4,249 isn’t exactly cheap, Franceschetti believes its flexibility — the product can be added on top of your existing mattress rather than buying a new one — will help bring “sleep fitness” to a whole new audience.
The company also makes its own mattresses with temperature control that retail for between $1,500 and $2,000, but Franceschetti said he wants to be known as more than a “foam company.”
He, his wife Alexandra Zatarain and two other co-founders decided to base their headquarters in New York City — specifically, the Flatiron District — because, Franceschetti said, the best design and engineering talent is here.
New York also made sense since it’s an international hub.
“For a global company it’s one of the best places where we can meet the team very easily,” he adds. “And from here, we can travel very easily to our offices in Boston and San Francisco, or to China and Europe.”
The Pod 4 Ultra arrives at the height of the biohacking craze, as the rich and influential — from Silicon Valley to Wall Street — embrace ways to optimize every element of their life, including rest.
“Based on your biometrics, we take actions for you and so we deliver convenience, right? You have to do nothing. Just go to bed as you have done for the past X years of your life. You will just wake up more refreshed,” Franceschetti said.
“A lot of people in technology that are really into longevity and health and fitness and maximum performance realize that, by sleeping eight hours, you really maximize your brain performance,” Franceschetti added.
He cites how Jeff Bezos has said that the key to success is to make three good decisions per day. “For my brain to be at peak performance,” Franceschetti said, “I need to sleep eight hours. We already see that through temperature that we can give you more deep sleep faster. .. And so maybe you will be able, in a few years, to sleep only six hours and get more rest.”
While many buzzy start-up mattress companies, like Casper, saw demand soar and then fall over the past few years, Eight Sleep is betting that its innovation and improving health technology will stay relevant.
“The overall strategy will be a portfolio strategy … there will be cheaper products, but there will also be more expensive products,” he said, likening it to how Tesla has a broad price range.
Among Eight Sleep’s sleep enhancements in development is a mattress that will scan the user’s body every night to detect health conditions like heart disease.
This story is part of NYNext, a new editorial series that highlights New York City innovation across industries, as well as the personalities leading the way.
Franceschetti is already testing out the next product: a hyperbaric oxygen tank with blackout curtains and temperature control.
