Co-founders Sean Kaiser and Kristina Pearkes got their first business idea as mechanical engineering students at Montreal’s McGill University. “I’d signed up for a class called Technical Entrepreneurship and convinced Sean to come along,” Pearkes recalls. “It was basically all about idea generation and startups; you first had to come up with an idea or problem that needed solving, and over the course of the class you’d pitch it and refine it.” Their first notion centered around making it easier for students to buy and sell home cooking from each other. “It was a problem we had ourselves, and the solution was pretty simple, so we thought we should actually try it for real; that’s how we got started.” On the strength of this initial concept, the pair were accepted into Next 36, a highly competitive founder development program from NEXT Canada.
Fairly early on, Kaiser notes, they came to a realization: “The first idea felt more like a hobby to us, and we started to ask ourselves ‘Do we really want to do this? Should we try something else?’ Next 36 was a good forcing function for us that way.” Kaiser and Pearkes decided they wanted to do something more impactful that involved technology more directly and put their degrees and skillsets to use. Mental health and neurotechnology soon floated to the top of their shortlist, and the duo dove into the research, reading every paper they could get their hands on and talking with researchers at the Montreal Neurological Institute.
“We kept seeing a link between insomnia and mental health,” Kaiser says, “and it became apparent that a lot of the way insomnia is diagnosed these days is subjective; there’s not a lot of objective diagnoses.” Hard data is much more useful, but there’s a catch: it’s also harder to collect, relying on strapping a series of electroencephalogram electrodes to your head at a specialized clinic. The research they’d been reading pointed toward a much easier way to get that done. “Everybody knows how to wear earplugs,” says Kaiser, and with that idea, Orbityl began in earnest.
The main challenge, Kaiser reveals, was proving out their core concept. “Our whole business is predicated on being able to detect brainwaves from inside your ear canal. We’d seen a few papers theorizing that you could do it, but now we had to go about actually validating that it was possible.” It turned out it was; Orbityl ended up winning the Outstanding Venture Award for their cohort at Next 36.
After verifying the viability of their technology, Orbityl needed to get started on its commercial development. A fellow Next 36 alum, Sensassure, pointed them in the direction of Highway1, from which Sensassure had graduated in 2016. “Our goal is to build out our custom hardware by the end of the program,” Kaiser says. “On top of that, we’d like to be collecting data, so we can make our algorithms more robust, for a wider range of potential users.”
Orbityl has bigger ambitions than solving insomnia. “We want to bring this technology to the places that can have the biggest impact in people’s lives,” Kaiser says. “Ultimately, our aim is to provide objective measurement that helps you quantify your mental health.”
It’s a big job, but Pearkes says they’re looking forward to it: “When you first start off on a project, it seems like a giant mountain. You have to break it down into little bits and say ‘OK, let’s see if we can just do this first step.’ And if you’re able to do that, it gives you the confidence to take another step, and another. I find going chunk by chunk and being able to make progress that way rewarding, but it’s also motivating.”
