🔊 $100M To Fuel The Future of Sleep Performance

Eight Sleep, a sleep fitness company, just raised $100 million in Series D funding to turn your bed into an AI-powered recovery device.

The investment round was backed by firms such as HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, Y Combinator, and athletes, including Ferrari F1 driver Charles Leclerc and Zak Brown, CEO of McLaren F1, bringing the total funding for Eight Sleep to over $250 million.

The company’s goal with the new capital is “to supercharge” its AI roadmap and turn sleep into the ultimate performance hack.

Why Does This Matter?

While not “sports tech” on paper, Eight Sleep is directly tied to human and athletic performance.

For athletes, sleep isn’t a luxury.

It’s a complete game changer.

And the statistics, as they stand now, are alarming:

For professional athletes, optimizing sleep can mean the difference between gold and silver, between a season extended or cut short.

This is also where AI comes into play.

The company’s flagship product, Pod, offers features like measuring sleep stages, heart rate, breathing patterns, and movement.

Using these insights, it automatically adjusts temperature, elevation, and firmness.

It can also detect snoring and automatically elevate the base in response.

With this funding, they’re expanding beyond the Pod with a product called Sleep Agent.

This AI-driven system leverages large language models to create thousands of digital twins for each user and predict outcomes to optimize nightly recovery.

Eight Sleep has also already built a roster of athlete-investors and ambassadors, including:

This company isn’t just selling better mattresses.

They’re betting that AI combined with sleep equals the next multi-billion-dollar category in performance technology.

And this could make all the difference in recovery and longevity for some of the world's top performers.

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• Robinhood & Kalshi Partner To Launch Football Prediction Markets. Robinhood has partnered with Kalshi, the largest legal and federally regulated prediction market in the US, to launch new prediction markets for NFL and college games. The new football markets will be added to the stock trading app’s “Predictions Hub,” where users can already bet on sports such as baseball as well as non-sporting events. Robinhood says the markets will become available “in the coming days,” with contracts for the first two weeks of the college and NFL seasons going up first (more here).

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This week’s guest on the Vetted Sports podcast is Chris Wilkerson.

Chris Wilkerson is a former pro football player and twice-exited entrepreneur.

Currently, he is the General Partner of 51Ventures, a venture capital firm investing in relentless founders in sports tech who want to change the game.

In this episode, we discuss:
‣ His path from the NFL to building startups
‣ The inception and thesis behind 51Ventures
‣ Outlook and perspective on early-stage sports tech investing

Check out the full episode here: Apple | Spotify | YouTube