Capital, which never sleeps, focuses on the sleep of ordinary people.
Recently, Eight Sleep, a unicorn in the field of AI sleep, announced its entry into the Chinese market. The company was founded in San Francisco in 2014 and has received funding from world-renowned investors such as Y Combinator, Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia China.
In March this year, Eight Sleep completed the latest round of financing led by Tether Investments, and its valuation further increased to US$1.5 billion.
A reporter from “Kechuangban Daily” noticed that Eight Sleep has entered online channels such as Taobao and JD.com. The products on sale are mainly two mattresses, priced from 18,999 yuan and 31,999 yuan respectively. The currently lower-priced model has recorded sales records of 100+ on both e-commerce platforms.
What supports Eight Sleep’s tens of billions valuation is a “hardware + subscription” business model.
After purchasing the mattress and supporting hardware, users also need to subscribe to software services monthly to obtain additional functions such as AI temperature control automation and sleep analysis.
Eight Sleep said that this business model has been verified overseas, its global subscription renewal rate exceeds the industry average, and the company has now achieved positive free cash flow.
In fact, before Eight Sleep entered the Chinese market, AI+ sleep had already set off a craze in the capital market.
Traditional mattress giants such as Xilinmen and Mousse have successively launched smart mattress products.
Among them, Xilinmen not only cooperated with the brain-computer interface company Qiannao Technology, but also directly changed the company name to Xilinmen Healthy Sleep Technology Co., Ltd. at the end of 2025, trying to find a new business growth curve.
It is also understood that some listed furniture companies in the market are also widely looking for AI partners to install AI concepts into the traditional furniture business to boost market value.
Startup companies are also targeting this new track.
From a global perspective, since the second half of 2025, financing disclosures in the smart sleep track have begun to increase significantly.
Domestically, start-ups including Sleeping Matrix and Jinri Yixiu have announced their financing progress.
Among them, Today’s Yixiu is the entrepreneurial project of Wang Teng, an “Internet celebrity executive” who left Xiaomi amid the turmoil.
The project received bets from multiple investors including Zhiyuan Robotics, Hillhouse Venture Capital and Xilinmen in the seed round.
An anonymous smart furniture practitioner said that the huge market potential in the sleep field is the main motivation for entrepreneurs and capital to rush in.
“Compared with scenes such as exercise and diet, sleep has higher universality and stronger data continuity. It is one of the few physiological indicators that can be tracked and intervened for a long time. On the consumer side, it corresponds to the continued investment of middle- and high-income people. On the industrial side, it is a very important entry point for health management.”
According to Global Market.
According to a report by Insights, the global sleep technology device market size will be approximately US$24.9 billion in 2024, and is expected to soar to US$134.7 billion by 2034, with a compound annual growth rate of 18.5%.
Among them, North America occupies a leading position, with a market share expected to be approximately 42% in 2025.
The Asia-Pacific market has become a new growth pole, with China and Japan becoming the main driving forces, with a compound growth rate of 19.4% during the forecast period.
Changes in technical conditions are also lowering the threshold for industry entry.
The cost of a complete set of AI smart mattress hardware has been compressed to a low level, including core hardware such as pressure sensors, airbag adjustment systems, temperature control modules and IoT control units. The cost is only about 5,000 yuan. Adding the mattress body structure, the material cost of the entire product is about 6,000-7,000 yuan.
“From a supply chain perspective, this is not a business with high entry barriers.” said the above-mentioned practitioner.
In the quotation of this solution, the higher investment is on the software and system side. Software-related expenses such as AI model training, APP development and system integration have accumulated to one million yuan, which is much higher than the cost of a single piece of hardware.
This also means that the real watershed in the AI sleep track does not lie in hardware manufacturing capabilities, but in data capabilities and intelligent iteration.
The above-mentioned person further stated that most of the existing AI sleep products on the market are still in the primary stage of “sensing + adjustment”, such as using pressure sensors to identify indicators such as turning over, heart rate, breathing, etc., and then combining them with airbags or temperature control systems for simple adjustments. However, there are still obvious gaps in the further evolution to AI decision-making.
“If it is just perception and simple adjustment, it is essentially a hardware upgrade, and it is difficult to support continuous payment.”
This also explains to a certain extent the logic of Eight Sleep’s entry into the Chinese market at this time: the subscription model has been verified overseas, free cash flow has turned positive, and the next step in the global map will naturally fall on this huge market that has not yet been deeply developed.
However, it remains to be seen whether the subscription sleep service, which has been valued at US$1.5 billion by capital, can be successfully replicated in the Chinese market.
The above-mentioned industry insiders said that overseas markets generally have a relatively mature habit of paying for software subscriptions, while domestic consumers are still more accustomed to the “buy-out” consumer mentality. “Accepting continued monthly payments in addition to a ten thousand yuan mattress is itself a threshold.” It is worth noting that Eight Sleep, which has just entered the Chinese market, has chosen a sales method of giving away standard version subscription services to Chinese users for free.
It can be seen that in the context of the gradual decline in technical barriers and the accelerating influx of players, the AI sleep track is shifting from an early concept competition to a more realistic ability competition.
In the short term, the low threshold will most likely lead to a concentrated game of product form, price range and channel efficiency; in the medium and long term, what really determines differentiation is whether it can extend from hardware to services and gradually build sleep health platform capabilities.
