Eight Sleep raises $50M at $1.5B valuation from Tether, profitable, launching in China and Brazil

the number one AI agent for customer service. If you want AI to handle your customer support, go to Finn.ai. And without further ado, we have Matteo from Eight Sleep back on the stream. His fifth sixth time. We can't stop talking to this guy. How you doing, Matt?

Rested.

Good to see you.

Oh, good. Great to see you guys.

I have absolutely loved my aid sleep. I I continue to sleep on it. Uh negative 10 on my side, plus 10 on my wife's side. Uh my 5-year-old has a feature request. He says, "Where's my zone? I sleep in the middle." And we're like, "You don't sleep in the middle. You sleep in your bed." But I'm sure you get that all the time. But how are you?

All good. How are you doing, guys? We're fantastic. Really happy to be back here with some good news.

Always great to have you. Give us give us the news. What happened?

Um, we just announced a new round. We raised um $50 million, 1.5 billion. Oh. Congratulations.

And who'd you raise it from?

Uh from Tether Investments. So it's uh yeah the Tether company. They are doubling down on AI and and health and have been friends with Paulo the CEO for a for a long time. He's a really big fan of us and

very quickly he said okay how can I accelerate you guys even more? and we were able to close a deal very quickly.

Mhm. Amazing. Uh give give us an update on on the business overall, everything you're focused on this year, all that good stuff.

Yeah. Well, the best part is in in between now in 2025, we raised twice, right? Uh including this round, but the best part is we were profitable. So that that's the part I love the most. We we didn't need money. uh but you know when you have the right investors that they can really push you further it makes a sense from a strategic standpoint so we were profitable we launched three products last year now we sell in 34 countries uh we're going to launch in China in a matter of a few months so we'll be in China as well and then we will launch Brazil as well this year uh more hardware products coming um as I say strong unit economics a lot of people loving us and we just need to keep shipping uh what actually goes into an international launch for eight sleep

uh for 2026.

Yeah, I mean like uh you know it's a it's a he heavy product. It's not the easiest thing to ship in the world. You know, some some brands would have entered Brazil or China a long time ago, but you guys are going kind of country by country clearly focused uh much more strategically maybe. Yeah, we almost wanted to prove the strategy even at the board level. So we started with Canada and then from Canada we went to Australia and then Europe, then UK, then we launched Middle East which was super successful. Then we launched Mexico which was super successful and then Saudi Arabia, Singapore. Now the the next big bet is China which will happen in around April and then Brazil. Brazil is quite complicated. The interesting thing is we sell everything direct to consumer. So we don't use distributor stores or we don't go into any retail store. So we control everything. Um that makes things faster but at the same time is it there are still a lot of requirements also in terms of approval as a consumer uh electronics device. So usually that is the thing that requires the the longest and then the supply chain and the shipping. But that is honestly fairly trivial. What uh what what key kind of health trends are you tracking? I'm sure you were you were you

are peptides changing sleep at all?

Yeah. Isn't is I think there is one peptide that specifically targets sleep.

I'm just curious.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So, we're running some some clinical studies, but yes, there are a couple that seem promising for that

and um and u and then there are also some drugs about sleep apnea that seem really effective. They were not approved yet, but there are certain pills that it seems they can really help with the mitigation of sleep apnea. And then we we filed uh for FDA approval uh both for detection and mitigation of sleep apnea. We invented a new technology that mitigates sleep apnea without you wearing anything. I think it could be a massive home run for the business. Obviously, we we need to get to the finish line and prove it and get the FDA approval. But if that happens uh it would be a game changer for millions of people. You know 40% of people with sleep apnnea they don't even know they have it. And this is a life-threatening disease for certain people. And um I think we have a really nice solution that is extremely convenient seamless that will help millions or billions of people

billions. 93 last night.

Oh how' I do? 95% quality, 100% consistency, 7 hours and 18 minutes. Not too bad. Not too bad. Uh

91.

Oh, let's go.

But doesn't it But doesn't it adjust? Isn't it possible that I got a better night of sleep than John last night, but but he on average gets worse sleep and so he put up an okay a good night for him.

John's best night sleep is a nightmare for me.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But but but take me through what does it take to get me to 100? Uh I know that there are other pieces of the puzzle. I have the I have the I have the mattress cover of course, but uh should I be taking supplements? What else do you have for me that could get me to 100 more regularly?

Yeah. So you I I I would think in three dimension. On one side there is consistency. So going to bed at the same time, waking up at the same time. I'm I'm very consistent about drinking like a full bottle of wine before bed.

Is that good?

Perfect. That's not going to help with your with your score and with your HRV.

I just I just black out and then I wake up and I'm like I fell asleep. It was effective. Made me sleepy. Yeah,

actually I give a presentation to a bunch of entrepreneurs and some of them started challenging me and saying, "Yeah, I know that you keep saying this thing of the alcohol, but every time I I have a couple of drinks, I pass out, wake up." So at the end, I believe alcohol is not bad for me. And I say, "Look, man, we can look at your data.

We can look at your data. Yeah, I got the data." That's hilarious.

But statistically, it's not good.

Yes. But but on the on the supplement side, what's interesting? Melatonin. Give me kind of sort of your thesis about uh the other things that impact sleep.

Yeah, honestly, the one that works is is well known is melatonin. The problem with melatonin is you cannot keep taking melatonin for too long.

That's right.

Uh so usually we have run a bunch of studies and what we have seen is you should keep it below 0.5 milligrams.

Okay.

Uh that otherwise it creates dependency. Then when you're traveling or you want to adjust for leg, you can go up to 2 milligrams, something like that. But you should stop after 3 4 days. Not much.

Yeah.

Well, I said a lot of people take three to five milligrams every single night forever.

Yeah. And then they build a tolerance and they don't get anything out of it. Like you know, you can't just drink caffeine every single day and expect to have the same results.

Exactly. Then some people report some benefit with magnesium and some of that, but usually the benefits are fairly minimal. Mhm.

Um, right now the only one that is very well proven to work is uh melatonin.

Yeah. Uh, how many hours of sleep data do you have?

Me?

Yeah. At eight sleep, how how much data are you studying these days?

Oh, we crossed billions of nights.

I just want to just wanted an excuse. The interesting part is

what excites me is because we sell in 34 countries now.

Yeah.

It's so interesting, right, to really think that we are powering the sleep of across the globe, right? Different genders and different everything.

What can you tell us what country sleeps best?

Australia.

Australia sleeps best.

Yeah. There is a specific place in Australia

um on the coast where they sleep like babies.

Like unbeatable. That's amazing.

Um, Americans don't sleep very well in the grand scheme of things.

What What's the What's the thesis there? They're just by They're hanging out at the beach. They're super relaxed.

Yeah, they're they're lazy.

Yeah, I think so. It's probably just they know local culture where um they're still active and but they're probably way more consistent and they have more time for for for sleep. And then the other interesting thing is sometimes you see weird spikes in in good or in a good or bad direction for for sleep know I I we publish a long time ago I know how sleep dipped during the election election day or there are all these studies about when you know you change the time uh forward or backward all

daylight savings time or probably the Super Bowl there's a whole bunch of different dates

Super Bowl all that kind of things so it's yeah it's pretty video earnings probably people losing sleep.

Yeah, even after CO a lot of things changed. People started sleeping way longer after CO particularly during COVID they were sleeping like an hour longer on average per night which was pretty impressive and still today you see the difference across even the different days of the week.

Wow. Yeah, that's impressive. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congratulations on the round

on the new round

and we will talk to you soon, Matteo.

Yeah, it's great to see you as always.

Thank you. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. Crowdstrike secures AI and stops breaches. And let me also tell you about