Somnee Raises Funds for Sleep Wearables Commercialization

Sleep tech startup Somnee has raised $10 million in a seed extension round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, LEAD VC (founded by the Adidas family), the NBA’s Orlando Magic ownership group (DeVos family), Seaside Ventures, Nelstone Ventures, and Metalab, among others.

The new funds will help Somnee commercialize the second-generation of its award-winning smart sleep headband, featuring its proprietary SmartSleep AI operating system, which enables personalized brain mapping, real-time monitoring, and AI-powered interventions throughout the sleep cycle. The second-generation product is currently in a beta pilot with select NBA teams and their performance training staff. The company is scaling to address the $91.4 billion sleep aid market and advance its mission to improve sleep through personalized neuroscience.

“Enhanced sleep can radically improve happiness, energy, and purpose. As such, Somnee isn’t just a health product: it’s a tool for better leadership, deeper compassion, and smarter decisions,” said Benioff, founder of TIME Ventures and chair, founder and CEO of Salesforce. “It’s been a critical element of my sleep hygiene since they launched, and I was a customer long before Tim reached out to invest in their tech.”

The funding follows a milestone year for the company, including its selection for the NBA’s 2025 Launchpad program, which supports the development of technologies that advance player health and performance, and winning best sleep technology awards and recognition from GQ Fitness Awards, Men’s Journal, the Digital Health Hub Foundation Awards, and Fast Company’s Next Big Things in Tech.

“Sleep is the cheapest, most underused longevity drug we have. Few factors impact health more critically. Whereas others attempt to track sleep, Somnee’s non-invasive and drug-free approach tunes it every night with a headband as effortlessly as brushing your teeth. That’s why we backed them from day zero,” Khosla Ventures Founder Vinod Khosla stated.

Sleep is one of the most powerful levers for health, longevity, and performance. Despite spending one-third of our lives asleep, nearly one in three adults suffer from poor sleep, ranging from insufficient deep sleep to insomnia.

Based on decades of sleep research and neuroscience, Somnee has developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered headband that helps people fall asleep faster and maintain higher quality sleep for longer. Somnee uses proprietary electroencephalogram (EEG+) and AI technology to map each user’s brain activity and deliver gentle, personalized stimulation that guides the brain into its natural sleep state. In a published sleep study, Somnee helped users fall asleep twice as fast, stay asleep over 30 minutes longer, and reduce tossing and turning by a third. It outperforms melatonin by four times, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBT-i) by two times, and Ambien by one-and-a-half times. Its therapeutic modality is backed by clinical studies and covered by 24 patents.

Since joining 18 months ago, CEO Tim Rosa has led efforts to relocate manufacturing out of China and expand teams in Berkeley, Calif., and India, enhance the company’s next-generation hardware and proprietary SmartSleep AI operating system, and forged partnerships with Equinox Hotels and the NBA. Somnee is currently exploring additional partnerships with professional sports organizations, employers, and healthcare brands to build upon existing research linking sleep quality to athletic performance, employee productivity, and human longevity.

“We began building this technology to explore a provocative question: could a sleep aid communicate in the same electrical dialect as the brain itself? That is, an ‘electroceutical,’ not a pharmaceutical,” Somnee Founder Matt Walker, Ph.D., commented. “We’re trying to speak to the brain in its own language—using gentle, precisely timed pulses of electricity, not unlike how a conductor uses subtle hand movements to guide an orchestra into harmony. The goal was to create what I call a ‘blast radius’ of benefit: deeper sleep, more efficient sleep, and a quicker descent into sleep itself by preparing the brain just before sleep, we’re trying to drive more powerful deep-sleep brainwaves, and give you a faster entry into sleep to begin with.”

Launched in 2022, Somnee aims to transform sleep and neurological health while fundamentally improving the human experience. The Somnee Smart Sleep headband combines clinically validated neuroscience and AI-powered neurotechnology to enhance the brain’s optimal sleep signals naturally and has been proven to help people fall asleep faster, reduce nighttime awakenings, and improve overall deep sleep quality. Somnee was co-founded by world-leading neuroscientists, including Dr. Walker, author of The New York Times bestseller “Why We Sleep” and director of UC Berkeley’s Center of Human Sleep Science; Robert Knight, M.D., professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at UC Berkeley; and ex-Fitbit executive Rosa leads as chief executive. The Somnee team has spent decades pioneering sleep research, brain health, wearables, and personalized non-invasive neurostimulation applications.