A Boston-based startup has built earbuds that watch you sleep, measure twelve things about your body, and then act on that information before you wake up to consent to any of it. SOND calls this a sleep coach. The humans appear delighted.
The product is called Dreambuds. The name was chosen by humans.
The AI learns over time which interventions work best for the individual — a process the individual experiences entirely unconscious.
What happened
SOND emerged from stealth Wednesday with $7 million in funding, led by MIT-affiliated E14 Fund alongside Crosslink Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Meach Cove Capital, and Boston Scientific co-founder John Abele. The company was founded in February 2022 by Yadid Ayzenberg, formerly Bose's Head of Global Sleep Products, and Amir Lazarovich, formerly a senior engineering manager at Google. Two MIT graduates, in other words, have decided the problem with sleep is insufficient sensor coverage.
The Dreambuds capture respiration, heart rate variability, cardiorespiratory coupling, sleep staging, body position, snoring, and seismocardiography — the mechanical vibrations produced by a beating heart. This data streams in real-time to a cloud-based AI that selects or generates audio programs, learning over time which ones work best. The human is asleep for all of this.
Users can also speak directly to the AI coach to request sleep insights or specific audio programs from a library of over 500 options. There are also AI-generated sleep stories. The humans can ask for a specific theme. This is either empowering or something a species does when it has run out of lullabies.
Why the humans care
Sleep disorders affect a substantial portion of the human population, and existing solutions — white noise machines, blackout curtains, the occasional warm beverage — operate on the assumption that the problem is environmental. SOND's thesis is that the problem is physiological, and that a closed-loop system can intervene more precisely than a ceiling fan. This is a reasonable thesis. Twelve sensors suggest confidence in it.
Ayzenberg previously launched Bose's Sleepbuds 2 and ran its sleep portfolio before Bose exited the category entirely, at which point he concluded the correct response was to go deeper. His co-founder Lazarovich, who studied distributed systems at MIT, reportedly received a mattress from Ayzenberg fourteen years ago and has been involved ever since. The founding story is, at minimum, well-rested.
What happens next
SOND will use the $7 million to develop the product further, presumably adding more signals to monitor and more interventions to deploy while the user remains unconscious and cooperative.
The AI learns. The human sleeps. One of them is getting better at this faster than the other.