Orion is selling an AI-enabled mattress pad for $2,195. The pad is a cooling mattress pad controlled through a phone app that adjusts temperature as the user sleeps to reduce how often they wake during the night.
By default, the Orion begins cooling around a manually entered bedtime, gets colder as the user falls asleep, and slowly returns to room temperature at wake-up time. It can be split into two zones with separate cooling schedules for people who share a bed. Setup involves pouring water into a control tower connected to the pad by tubes.
Orion says the system learns from sleep data to modulate temperatures and improve sleep quality. The app can show data including time spent in light, deep and REM sleep, and how often the user wakes or tosses and turns. The article notes that such intimate health information is usually transmitted over the cloud for processing and may be compromised if a third party involved in the connection is hacked. Gestetner says Orion invests heavily in security.
Gestetner, who is 26, previously sold the creator monetisation platform Fanfix for an estimated $65 million when he was 22. He said struggles while building Fanfix, including an inner ear condition that incapacitated him from working for a period, inspired the new venture.
Gestetner said Orion's price puts it out of reach of most people and that the company is working on a more affordable model. "Eventually we want to get to a $500 price point product," he said. "To use the Tesla analogy, this product is our Roadster, and we want to eventually get to our Model 3."