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Traditionally, sleep earbuds have been designed to mask outside noise and promote sleep with calming sounds. But today, a Boston-based startup called SOND is introducing a new type of earbuds designed to actively intervene to encourage better sleep.
Founded by a pair of MIT grads, one who is Bose’s former Head of Global Sleep, SOND emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $7 million in funding. Together with the funding, the company introduced its debut product: Dreambuds, a closed-loop, in-ear system that captures 12 physiological signals from the wearer, then acts on them in real time to help consumers get better sleep.
Its initial investment of the $7 million comes from E14 Fund (an MIT-affiliated fund), Crosslink Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Meach Cove Capital, and Boston Scientific co-founder, John Abele.
To work, the device tracks signals like respiration, heart rate variability, cardiorespiratory coupling, sleep staging, body position, snoring, and seismocardiography (SCG, or the mechanical vibrations of the chest wall produced by the beating heart).
This sensor data streams in real time to a cloud-based AI sleep coach that then selects a sleep audio program, or generates one on demand, learning over time which ones work best for the individual user.
Users can also interact with the AI sleep coach directly by speaking, asking for sleep insights, or for specific sleep programs from SOND’s proprietary library of over 500 audio programs. (Users can also opt to stream podcasts through the case, if they prefer.) The AI coach can also generate audio, like a sleep story with a certain theme, when asked.
Notably, the startup was co-founded and is led by CEO Yadid Ayzenberg, who previously worked at Bose as its Head of Sleep Products, where he launched Bose’s Sleepbuds 2 and ran the company’s portfolio of other sleep products. When Bose decided to strategically exit the sleep business, Ayzenberg realized it presented an opportunity to form a startup dedicated to new products in this space, which led him to found SOND in February 2022.
“I had spent, at this time, a significant amount of time around physiology, around sensors, around audio … I was meant to do this,” Ayzenberg told TechCrunch while sitting at an outdoor cafe alongside co-founder and CTO Amir Lazarovich, formerly a senior software engineering manager at Google, alongside their prototype Dreambuds device.
The co-founders met at MIT, a meeting that also had to do with sleep. Lazarovich, who was studying distributed systems, had just moved into a family dorm and didn’t have a mattress; Ayzenberg offered him one from his room to use instead. That chance encounter some 14 years ago led to a lifelong friendship.
After MIT, Ayzenberg founded a startup called The Sync Project, which mapped music to physiological factors like heart rate and heart rate variability. The startup was acquired by Bose after four years and ultimately led to his work with the second generation of Sleepbuds.