Counting sheep

Roughly 150 million Americans struggle to fall asleep, and the conditions that disrupt their Zzzs often go undiagnosed. The market hasn’t hit snooze on the innovation opportunity. Last week, ARPA-H, the government’s moonshot health research arm, launched REST (Restorative and Health-Enhancing Sleep Time), a program to fund at-home technologies that can measure health-relevant brain activity during sleep or intervene in real time to improve it.

Meanwhile, Essence Healthcare recently expanded its partnership with Oura to identify members at risk for sleep apnea, and Natural Cycles launched a sleep-tracking feature to help women understand how hormonal changes affect rest and recovery. Others are taking monitoring a step further into intervention—and temperature, sound, and scent are all in the mix. In March, Eight Sleep raised $50M at a $1.5B valuation for its mattress cover that automatically adjusts bed temperature. Last month, SOND emerged from stealth with $7M in funding for earbuds designed to improve sleep. And personalized scent therapy tech-maker Kimba recently launched with $6.5M, touting smell as the only sensory channel that can reliably influence brain activity without waking the user.

Much of the recent activity seems oriented toward sleep optimization—helping healthy people sleep deeper, longer, or more efficiently. We’ll be curious to see if this latest wave of innovation can find its way to people with condition-based clinical needs and make a difference beyond readiness scores.

Headlines

FDA Warns Telehealth Companies Over Compounded GLP-1s
A second enforcement wave pressuring D2C weight-loss prescribers Endpoints News

Whoop, HealthEx Partner To Connect Medical Records And Biometric Data
Wearable-to-EHR integration moves from aspiration to live product Fierce Healthcare

Delta Dental And Midi Health Expand Partnership
Oral-systemic integration finds a new distribution channel Femtech Insider

Lantern, Marathon Health To Launch Integrated Care Management Model
Partnership to make primary care the front door to specialty services Fierce Healthcare

Recent Funding

• Connie Health secures $40M to scale its Medicare navigation platform
• Administrative agentic AI platform Prosper AI locks in $30M
• Clair Health raises $11.6M for its continuous hormone monitoring wearable
• Kimba launches with $6.5M for personalized scent-based sleep therapy
• Vali Health lands $6M to deploy scheduling and workforce automation for home care agencies