From Luna to Eight: Italian Talents Give The Best Night Sleep with a Small Tech Device
I met the guys who own and manage Eight, a company that sells ‘smart’ mattresses. They have raised a $5 million Series A round.
On January 24, they opened the doors to the first showroom in downtown Manhattan, Eight Suite, where shoppers can test out the startup’s mattresses and try the technology and the integration with other ‘smart’ home brands.
The Italian name immediately reminds of night and dreams. However, the product’s name proves a new way of approaching sleeping: Luna is a product that has been launched by a group of Italian talents that surprised the market with a new, innovative technology. The slogan you will find in their website does not leave any space for uncertainty or doubt: Luna is right now the world’s smartest mattress cover which, in an increasingly busy world, can help people get better nights sleep. Science has proven that a good sleep depends on how much comfort you get from your mattress, however buying a new, comfortable, expensive mattress may not be enough to make a night sleep somehow perfect.
What Matteo Franceschetti and his team have produced is simple and sophisticated at the same time: this mattress cover has the ability to track each person’s sleep phases and to identify the moment of lightest sleep, in order for the person to wake up, by feeling refreshed and ready for the day. The cover is not just an additional sensing device that everybody can have, but has also a bed warmer through which you can control the warmth of the bed.
The idea has found lots of positive reviews among the tech world, while these Italian talents started finding their names in the press: from CNN to Forbes, from Vogue to TechCrunch, business specialists and experts have found the project not just brilliant for the problem it addresses, but also great for the people’s future life. The team is now composed of seven members, including scientific advisers who weigh in on the health components of certain features like temperature regulation.
Matteo Franceschetti is Luna’s Co-founder, together with Massimo Andrea Bassi and Andrea Ballarini. Matteo left his job as lawyer to get into the renewable energy and tech world. He has been working in the past seven years as an entrepreneurs and, as he told us, lost approximately 900 hours of sleep due primarily to restless legs syndrome. Together with Massimo, the CTO of the company, Matteo came up with the idea in January 2014, after long talks about his sleep problems. Two months later, they started talking about their project with a friend who did not hesitate to write a $25,000 check to get it started.
How did you come up with this idea?
I have problems to sleep and a couple of years ago I started looking at the sleep market. Around one year ago, we were brainstorming about smart devices and we started wondering why none was making smart beds. That is how we came up with the idea of Luna.
You all come from different fields. What made you converge towards the same project?
Massimo and I have been friends for a long time and working in technology for years. When the Luna’s idea came out, we were all ready for this new journey together.
You launched an original crowdfunding campaign that was 1,103% funded back in March. Why do you think it was so successful?
Luna launched an Indiegogo campaign, selling its products for $179 to $229 depending on bed size. When it ended, it had surpassed the original goal of $100,000 ten-fold, raising over $1.4 million from over 6,000 backers. I think we were able to identify a problem several people have. We spend 1/3 of our life in bed, and it is time for technology to take care of us while we sleep.
How would you explain the technology behind Luna?
Luna tracks your sleep and manages the temperature of your bed. The tracking part works like a stethoscope: Luna transforms any bed in a stethoscope and tracks your sleep, heart rate and breathing rate every single night. The temperature management part is a sort of smart heating pad that learns your habits and preferences and adjusts the temperature accordingly.
Originally published at www.italoamericano.org on October 2, 2015.