Acquisition adds sleep and health coaching to optimize health and increase performance
#Miamitech’s favorite sleep fitness startup is about to get even more personal.
Eight Sleep announced today it has acquired Span Health, a data-driven health-coaching company. The acquisition will enhance Eight Sleep’s sleep-fitness offering with additional tools to users to improve every aspect of Eight Sleep users’ health and performance through personalized services that match their needs, the team said.
“Beyond sleeping well, we can do so much more for your health with sleep as a starting point so we’re super excited about this acquisition because of where it takes us,” said Alexandra Zatarain, who co-founded the Miami-based Eight Sleep startup with her husband and CEO Matteo Franceschetti.
Sleep will always be at the core of Eight Sleep, the Miami-based startup that leverages its proprietary technology and data to engineer sleep products that restore individuals to their peak energy levels every morning. Eight Sleep’s flagship smart bed, the Pod Pro, and the technology embedded into it can optimize the environment to help you optimize your sleep, in real time. “But all that technology has always told us more about a person’s health than just how they’re sleeping,” said Zatarain, Eight Sleep’s VP of Brand and Marketing.
Moving further into health coaching has always been in the plan.
“It’s all connected. We could build the perfect environment for your sleep, but if you’re not as an individual changing your habits, you’re not going to improve your sleep entirely,” she said. “The moment when we connected with Span, we realized there could be a lot of value in bringing these experts into our company who had already spent years exploring the space.”
Span’s leadership team including Patrick Samy, Chief Executive Officer, and Adam Bataineh, Chief Medical Officer will be joining the Eight Sleep Product team.
The acquisition is just the latest milestone for Eight Sleep. Since the startup’s $86 million in a Series C fundraise last summer, Eight Sleep has gone global. Beyond the US, Eight Sleep products are now available in Canada, the United Kingdom, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain, and another market will be announced in a couple of months. “The global expansion is on its way, which has been pretty exciting, and those markets are growing tremendously,” Zatarain said.
Eight Sleep has also been busy building partnerships in the in the high-performance space. In addition to a long list of celebrity partners, Eight Sleep is the official sleep fitness product for Barry’s, the popular boot camp company now also headquartered in Miami. This month, Eight Sleep was named an Official Supplier to the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team, which is coming to Miami next month for the F1 races. The entire Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1 team, including the drivers, team leadership, engineers and pit stop crew – 2,000 people in all — will have access to the Pod Pro and Eight Sleep digital technologies to optimize their sleep and ensure peak performance for the 2022 and 2023 season. “These types of partnerships are very exciting because they are further proof of what we are building and the value that these organizations find in it, and this also helps us continue to raise awareness about our mission,” Zatarain said.
Eight Sleep closed out the year of 2021 tripling its revenue over 2020. It hired a research and development team, which was a team that didn’t exist before. The company also hired a clinical validation team, which has allowed Eight Sleep to start doing very thorough validations of its products that improve different aspects of health, Zatarain said.
That includes research on the impact Eight Sleep’s Pod technology has on people’s heart rate variability (HRV). “What we see is close to 50% of users within seven days of sleeping on the Pod see an increase in their HRV of at least 10%. An increase in HRV is an indication of better recovery,” she said. “So those are the sorts of things we’ve been focusing on as we hire to bring on people for more innovation, new products and new opportunities to help people sleep better, and also a team that is proving that all these products are actually leading to results.”
The Eight Sleep team, mostly distributed, numbers about 80. About 8 to 10 of them are living in the Miami area, Zatarain said, including some from the team that relocated. Franceschetti and Zatarain, who moved to Miami from New York City in 2020, have been hosting all of their offsite team gatherings in Miami, including its executive team this week and its growth and marketing team in January. “That’s usually how people fall in love with Miami,” Zatarain said.
Eight Sleep is hiring “across the board,” everything from engineers and data scientists, to media managers for performance advertising, and finance.
With the acquisition of Span, expect more innovation into what Eight Sleep can do with data, some new product launches coming and more interesting partnerships that help Eight Sleep better tell its story, Zatarain said. The acquisition takes Eight Sleep even further into healthtech, an area of considerable strength for #MiamiTech.
Photo at top of post: Eight Sleep’s co-founders Matteo Franceschetti (CEO), with Alexandra Zatarain (VP of Brand & Marketing), and Massimo Andreasi Bassi (CTO).
Follow Nancy Dahlberg on Twitter @ndahlberg and email her at [email protected]
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