Eight Sleep Embraces AI For Mattress Topper

What is it about sleep technology that causes tech investors to dream of immense riches? Eight Sleep, which makes high-tech mattress toppers and is a favorite brand of many tech luminaries, announced Tuesday it had raised $100 million partly to—in all seriousness—“supercharge its AI roadmap”with projects including an “AI Agent for Sleep Optimization.” As AI agents are generally defined as artificial intelligence that undertakes actions on behalf of users, should we assume Eight Sleep’s sleep agent will sleep for you?

Not quite. Eight Sleep says its agent will build on an existing feature, which adjusts its beds based on sleep behavior, by simulating “thousands of digital twins per user, allowing it to predict outcomes through advanced modeling.” That sounds like a lot of fancy marketing words that are hard to take seriously. Still, Eight Sleep has some heavyweight backers—Valor Equity Partners, an existing investor, is putting in more money for this round, along with Founders Fund and others. You have to wonder, though, whether venture capitalists are looking through a skeptical enough lens at companies that claim an AI strategy nowadays. These claims of an AI-powered mattress topper are reminiscent of the flood of internet-enabled toasters we saw a few years ago.