With too much screen time and too little down time, sleep is becoming a precious commodity, and a venture capital group has launched its first fund to invest in startups worldwide working on science-backed innovations that seek to improve sleep.
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Supermoon Capital, formerly SleepScore Ventures, opened Wednesday with its first venture fund of $36 million targeting the $488 billion sleep economy.
"Sleep is truly the most important but least understood aspect of everyone's daily life that affects our health, happiness, and productivity," said Pat Connolly, co-founder and managing partner of Supermoon Capital.
"We founded Supermoon Capital with the mission to serve as the premier source of capital and expertise for the Night Market. We believe that by reuniting our chronically fatigued world with healthy sleep, we can extend and enhance the lives of millions around the globe," Connolly said.
"We saw an enormous need for a fund entirely focused on sleep; sleep science is a relatively young but quickly growing field, and the science is highly complex," said Michael Masterson, co-founder and managing partner of Supermoon Capital. "Many of the sleep-related products and solutions currently on the market are unfortunately unscientific, unproven, and in some cases unhealthy. What we are seeing is an increasing need for science-based sleep solutions, not just business model innovations or marketing. We aim to bridge the gap between science-driven innovation in sleep and commercialization for the Night Market. We've assembled an arsenal of sleep science resources that help us identify, back, and develop best-in-class early-stage startups from around the world."
Supermoon Capital has assembled a Sleep Science Collective of the world's top sleep scientists, prominent academics, and industry experts across a range of relevant fields in sleep that serves as an extended advisory team to the fund and portfolio. Supermoon Capital's investors include ResMed, a global leader in digital health and the number one provider of connected devices to treat sleep apnea. Supermoon Capital holds an exclusive strategic relationship with SleepScore Labs that provides its portfolio companies with access to the sleep improvement company's innovative science and data-backed products and services.
To date, Supermoon Capital has invested in six early-stage startups comprising a global portfolio that spans a range of technology sectors and industries and includes Israel's Clair Labs, a Tel Aviv-based startup that is developing contact-free technology to provide clinical-grade physiological monitoring.
Founded in 2018 by CEO Adi Berenson and CTO Dr. Ran Margolin, Clair Labs's technology enables continuous, round-the-clock monitoring for physiological markers such as heart rate, respiration, air flow, body temperature, SpO2 and more. The system also monitors behavioral markers, including sleep patterns, distress, tracking changes in the patient's position, detecting their intent to rise, among others. The data is fed to smart learning algorithms which in turn produce accurate evaluations and alerts.
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