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It all started with a simple realization: sleep is everything.

It shapes how we feel, how we perform, how we think, and even how we age. Whether you're pushing your body like an athlete or your mind like a developer or investor, sleep is the most powerful, side-effect-free performance enhancer we have.

The more I read, the more I realized:

we actually understand a lot about sleep—but apply very little of it in practice.

We know what good sleep looks like.

We have studies, models, even lab-grade diagnostics.

But most of that stays in the realm of theory, or buried in apps that throw numbers at you without giving you much to act on.

There’s plenty of tracking. Plenty of tips.

But where were the tools that could actually help people sleep better—without needing perfect habits, endless willpower, or a total lifestyle overhaul?

That disconnect stayed in my mind.

And eventually, it became something I wanted to work on.

That’s where the idea for Somnus Lab came from—not just to track sleep better (which is valuable), but to also build the kind of product that makes great sleep more likely, by default.

From Software to Sleep

Before this, my world was software and algorithms. I’ve spent 15+ years building digital products and companies, most recently leading AI personalization at Klarna after they acquired our startup.

But in 2024, I stepped away from the known. Not because I was done building—but because I wanted to build something more physical, human, and tangible. Something that could directly touch people’s lives, night after night.

Why Sleep?

Sleep isn't just a part of our lives—it's a biological imperative. As sleep researcher Matthew Walker often notes, humans spend about a third of our lives asleep, and that’s not some evolutionary accident.

In fact, almost all animals studied—mammals, birds, reptiles, insects—show some form of sleep or rest behavior. Even if the duration and mechanisms vary, the universality of sleep across evolution tells us something: it's essential.

What’s even more fascinating is how recent our scientific understanding of sleep actually is. For decades, researchers couldn’t quite explain why we sleep. But in the last 20 years, neuroscience has made huge leaps—linking sleep to memory consolidation, metabolic regulation, immune function, emotional stability, and cellular repair.

Sure, some of these theories may evolve (as all good science does), but many of today’s explanations are not only convincing—they’re productizable.

And then there's the personal shift. Over the last 10–15 years, I—and many others in the \"high-performance-seeking\" group—have experienced a real mindset change. Back in 2009, I was a full-time master’s student at KTH, building a startup at the SSE Business Lab in Stockholm, and working part-time nights at Bain & Co, covering the US market. My days ended after midnight.

At that time, especially in entrepreneurial circles, sleep was seen as optional—a weakness. The motto was: “I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

But today, even in fast-moving industries, there’s growing consensus: sleep isn’t a luxury—it’s the foundation.

And as we’ve grown more aware of sleep’s importance, so too has the market for sleep tracking. There’s now a wide array of wearable and non-wearable devices that help us measure sleep quality—albeit not with the accuracy of clinical gold standards like polysomnography (PSG), which involves tracking brain waves, eye movement, muscle tone, and heart rhythm overnight in a lab.

Still, consumer-grade trackers are good enough to start with, and as the saying goes: to improve something, you first need to measure it.

Interestingly, while I find tracking useful, not everyone reacts the same way. Some people—especially those already struggling with sleep—find that knowing they didn’t sleep \"perfectly\" adds stress, which ironically makes sleep even harder. Personally, I’m not bothered by it, but it opened my eyes to a deeper issue:

Yes, we’re tracking more—but then what?

You wake up with a score: 68. Or 82. Maybe it tells you you had too much REM or not enough deep sleep. But what are you supposed to do with that information?

Often, the advice is vague or unhelpful: “Avoid your phone before bed,” “Get more sunlight,” “Eat well, exercise.” All great advice, in theory. But it’s like telling someone who’s struggling with weight, “Just eat healthy and work out.”

If it were that easy, we wouldn’t be here.

So at Somnus Lab, our approach is different. We want to create a solution that works regardless of willpower or perfect conditions—something that’s universally beneficial for anyone trying to sleep better.

That said, we’re not pretending to offer a clinical cure for insomnia. We’re not a replacement for therapy or medical intervention. Think of what we’re building like a great sports coach: we can help you improve your sleep performance, night by night. But if you’ve got a broken leg, we won’t fix the bone. Even then, though, we can still help you move better, more comfortably.

For me, this isn’t just about personal health. It’s about tapping into one of the most overlooked, most potent performance levers we all share. That’s why sleep became the first problem I wanted to solve.

Why Temperature, First

$\"\"$

\nThe circadian rhythm of body temperature, which typically dips during the early morning hours and peaks in the late afternoon or evening

There are a lot of things that affect sleep—light, noise, stress, habits—but temperature stands out. Not just because it’s powerful, but because it’s something we can actually control. And with the right technology, you can personalize it with surgical precision.

Your body follows a roughly 24-hour circadian rhythm—and so does your core temperature. It gradually falls before sleep, reaches its lowest point about 2–3 hours before natural wake-up time, then starts rising to help trigger alertness. When the environment aligns with that rhythm, your body gets the signal faster: cooler when it’s time to fall asleep, warmer when it’s time to wake.

What’s wild is: this rhythm isn’t random. Among your core vital signs—heart rate, breathing, and temperature—temperature is the most stable and predictable across the day, especially if you’re not doing high-intensity activity. That makes it a really strong anchor for your sleep-wake cycle.

And it’s not just about tracking it—it goes both ways. Lowering your environment’s temperature can actually help induce sleepiness. Warming it can help you wake up more gently. If we can align the temperature around you with your internal rhythm, your body gets the message faster.

This isn’t just a theory—it’s one of the most studied and validated levers in sleep science. There are multiple randomized, peer-reviewed studies confirming how thermal shifts influence sleep onset, depth, and architecture. And from my own engineering mindset, many of these explanations are not just well-supported—they’re logically convincing.

So it becomes crucial to align your temperature environment with your sleep rhythm—to keep cool when your body expects to be cool, and warm when it should be warm. you fall asleep easier, wake up better, and spend more time in deep and REM sleep. It all happens quietly in the background.

Last but not least, temperature is a technically solvable problem. Unlike other factors like light (which is tough to control throughout the day), we can design reliable, precise, and comfortable temperature solutions that actually work at home, every night.

So yes, it has a big impact. Yes, the science is there. And yes, we can build something that makes it usable in real life.

Designing for Sleep, Not Just Features

Once we decided to start with temperature, we got to the next first-principle question: How do we design something people actually want to sleep with—not just use?

We didn’t want to build a gadget. We wanted to create a product that would quietly and reliably improve someone’s sleep every night, without demanding attention or adding friction.

That meant stepping away from a tech-first mindset and designing around the human experience. Every feature we prioritized came down to one principle:

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Will this actually help someone sleep better, in a real bed, next to a real partner, with real life happening around them?
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After a lot of research, testing, and long discussions, we decided to make our first product a thin, water-circulating mattress pad that sits between your sheet and your mattress. It connects to a base unit that heats and cools water, quietly pumping it through channels embedded in the pad to precisely regulate your body temperature throughout the night.

We chose this form factor for a few key reasons:

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It’s minimally invasive: no fans, no clunky air ducts, nothing bulky or loud.
\n
\n
It blends into your existing setup: you don’t need to change your bed, mattress, or habits.
\n
\n
And it gives us the precision we wanted—water is far more efficient and responsive than air when it comes to thermal regulation.
\n

This was our way of building something powerful, but invisible. A product that disappears into the background while it does its work.

Beyond the science, we’ve also thought a lot about the user experience. Temperature needs are highly individual—one person’s ideal sleep temp might be unbearable to someone else. That’s why we built in dual-zone control, so you and your partner don’t have to compromise. You can each define your own optimal microclimate.

You can manually adjust the temperature if you know what works for you—or let our beta AI system handle it. It learns your rhythm and fine-tunes the thermal curve through the night, so you don’t have to think about it.

We probably need another post to go deeper into how we reasoned through our product boundaries—what we chose to include, what we deliberately left out, and why good sleep design starts with restraint.

Stay tuned

We’re just getting started. In the next post, I’ll share more about how this project came together—the shift from software to hardware, the messy early prototyping phase, and the lessons we learned designing a product you sleep with, not just on.

If you’re interested in sleep, performance, hardware, or the realities of building something from scratch—stick around.

There’s a lot more to come.

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