Traditionally, sleep earbuds have been designed to mask outside noise and promote sleep with calming sounds. But today, a Boston-based startup called SOND is introducing a new type of earbuds designed to actively intervene to encourage better sleep.
Founded by a pair of MIT grads, one who is Bose’s former Head of Global Sleep, SOND emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $7 million in funding. Together with the funding, the company introduced its debut product: Dreambuds, a closed-loop, in-ear system that captures 12 physiological signals from the wearer, then acts on them in real-time to help consumers get better sleep.
Its initial investment of the $7 million comes from E14 Fund (an MIT-affiliated fund), Crosslink Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Meach Cove Capital, and Boston Scientific co-founder, John Abele.
To work, the device tracks signals like respiration, heart rate variability, cardiorespiratory coupling, sleep staging, body position, snoring, and seismocardiography (SCG, or the mechanical vibrations of the chest wall produced by the beating heart).
This sensor data streams in real-time to a cloud-based AI sleep coach that then selects a sleep audio program, or generates one on demand, learning over time which ones work best for the individual user.
Users can also interact with the AI sleep coach directly by speaking, asking for sleep insights, or for specific sleep programs from SOND’s proprietary library of over 500 audio programs. (Users can also opt to stream podcasts through the case, if they prefer.) The AI coach can also generate audio, like a sleep story with a certain theme, when asked.
Notably, the startup was co-founded and is led by CEO Yadid Ayzenberg, who previously worked at Bose as its Head of Sleep Products, where he launched Bose’s Sleepbuds 2 and ran the company’s portfolio of other sleep products. When Bose decided to strategically exit the sleep business, Ayzenberg realized it presented an opportunity to form a startup dedicated to new products in this space, which led him to found SOND in February 2022.
“I had spent, at this time, a significant amount of time around physiology, around sensors, around audio…I was meant to do this,” Ayzenberg told TechCrunch, while sitting at an outdoor cafe alongside co-founder and CTO Amir Lazarovich, formerly a senior software engineering manager at Google, alongside their prototype Dreambuds device.
The co-founders met at MIT, a meeting that also had to do with sleep. Lazarovich, who was studying distributed systems, had just moved into a family dorm and didn’t have a mattress; Ayzenberg offered him one from his room to use instead. That chance encounter some fourteen years ago led to a lifelong friendship.
After MIT, Ayzenberg founded a startup called The Sync Project, which mapped music to physiological factors like heart rate and heart rate variability. The startup was acquired by Bose after four years, and ultimately led to his work with the second generation of Sleepbuds.
Bose customers often wanted more from their Sleepbuds than noise cancellation, Ayzenberg says: they also wanted sensors to track their sleep and help them improve it. At the time, technology was not quite at the point of being able to bundle a lot of sensors into a small, AirPods-like form factor while still conserving the device’s battery, however. But by the time Bose was exiting sleep wearables, that had changed.
However, Ayzenberg cautioned, the Dreambuds shouldn’t be thought of as what could have been Bose’s Dreambuds III. Instead, he admits the earbuds from competitor Ozlo are more likely what would have been the next step.
“We did something entirely different. Maybe the form factor is an earbud, but that’s where it ends,” he said.
The system itself runs end-to-end without requiring a phone. Instead, Dreambuds’ charging case included Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, an OLED display, physical buttons, and a speaker. The latter will help you to wake up via your alarm even if you fall asleep before putting in the earbuds.
The goal is to stop users from needing to pick up their phone to control the sleep tech’s system.
“We have a running joke — we say giving an insomniac a phone is like running an AA meeting in a liquor store,” Ayzenberg says, with a laugh. “The idea here is that all you do is take the buds out and they’ll resume your sleep plan,” he explains. “You can also switch to other sleep plans. And you can talk to the coach, just double-tap and say, ‘I’m having trouble sleeping. I want this, or I want that.’”
The sleep coach can help with particular sleep problems by referring to its data about what’s worked for you in the past, whether that was a breathing exercise, a calming track, a soundscape, binaural beats, or something else. Ayzenberg confirms the AI coach will never talk to you unless you engage it with the double-tap gesture, as he acknowledges that it could otherwise startle users or even creep them out.
Lazarovich adds that the AI coach will respond based on the user’s current context. “For example, if you engage right before bedtime, it would ask you, ‘Are you ready to wind down?’ But if you engage after you woke up, it would ask you ‘How was your night?’,” he says.
In addition to hearing your results from the AI coach, Dreambuds owners can review their data and hypnograms (sleep cycle graphs) in the companion app to learn more about their sleep patterns.
The buds themselves have a unique look, as the team put the sensors facing out — opting for an artistic pattern of sensors instead of trying to hide the technology. The buds also feature wide-frequency drivers for high-fidelity audio, along with microphones and sensors for motion detection.
SOND has run a couple of comfort studies and betas, and now aims to bring the devices into mass production by Q2 2026, following a crowdfunding campaign to raise additional funds. The company is currently accepting reservations on its website.
