Alexandra Zatarain is the Co-Founder and VP of Brand and Marketing of Eight Sleep, the world’s first sleep fitness company. A marketer and brand-builder, Alexandra has built the Eight Sleep brand and scaled the company’s revenue from $0 to making nine digits yearly. She has done this by redefining a once dormant category, changing the narrative around sleep through the creation of the sleep fitness movement.

In 2017, Alexandra was named by Forbes to the 30 Under 30 list in Consumer Technology, and in 2020 she was named by INC as one of the top 100 Female Founders. Alexandra is also an angel investor in female-founded companies as a scout for Cleo Capital. She was raised in Tijuana, Mexico, and now lives in Miami.

Comments from Alex
“While there’s been a lot of innovation around how people exercise or eat, very little has been done around sleep. When we started the company there was not much out there to support the sleep of athletes and the general population, so we spent years researching and piloting the best of what technology can offer. The result is the Pod, which works with any bed and creates a truly extraordinary sleep experience.”

“At Eight Sleep we’re on a mission to fuel human potential through optimal sleep, and we’re excited that the Pod has become a competitive advantage for so many high performers in sport, business and life. Today over 300 elite athletes are using the Pod to up their recovery game and unlock new levels of performance.”

1. Who Uses Eight Sleep?

From tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to professional athletes such as Lewis Hamilton and Aaron Judge, to health experts like Matthew Walker and Andrew Huberman, to everyday high performers. The Pod is for anyone seeking to improve their quality of sleep and recovery, and nowadays almost everyone can benefit from that.

2. How does the Pod 3 help users get a good night’s sleep?

By personalizing the temperature of your bed according to your precise needs. We know temperature is the #1 determinant in sleep quality. The Pod can be added to any bed to create the ultimate sleep experience with heating & cooling and smart temperature adjustments for you and your partner.

The Pod is powered by the intelligence of Autopilot. As your body temperature changes overnight, Autopilot heats and cools your Pod to match your body’s natural rhythm, keeping you in deep sleep for longer. Autopilot takes into account your personal preferences, environment temperature, and sleep and health metrics to automatically adjust your temperature dynamically each night, resulting in better sleep.

The Pod detects when each person falls asleep, automatically adjusts temperature through the night, and turns on and off based on your individual schedules. The Pod measures your heart rate while you sleep with 99% accuracy. No wearable is required.

With the perfect temperature, resulting in better sleep, you have more energy to do what you love. Your sleep quality improves. Increasing your daily energy, improving your mood and unlocking clearer focus.

3. How the Pod 3 tracks sleep and collects data from the user.

We strive to provide our members with not only an optimal sleep experience but also highly accurate biometric data during sleep. Our sensing technology, embedded in the Pod’s Active Grid Cover, is designed to monitor a variety of biometrics without any wearable and for up to two people on the same bed.

For that, we use over 3,000 invisible sensors on the cover. This design presents a set of technical challenges, but it is also a better experience for our members who don’t have to wear a device to bed to monitor their sleep and health.

We’re particularly proud of the Pod’s heart rate and heart rate variability algorithms, which were validated against gold-standard electrocardiograms and achieved up to 99% accuracy.

4. How can improved sleep help with physical fitness and performance?

Eight Sleep has conducted research showing that people experience a significant improvement in their sleep and therefore, cardiovascular health after using Eight Sleep’s Pod. Through improvements in sleep quality, people saw health improvements via increased HRV and reduced Heart Rate during sleep (ref, ref). HRV improved by 6% on average. This improvement in HRV was still present after one month of sleeping on the Pod. Importantly, people with below-average HRV (i.e. less healthy individuals) experienced the largest increases in HRV after sleeping on the Pod (i.e. 9% increase on average, and up to 19% maximum increase).

Sleeping heart rate (HR) is linked to longevity, and so the lower your resting heart rate, the healthier you are. On average, subjects’ sleeping HR decreased by ~1 beat per minute (bpm) after using the Pod. To put it into context, a reduction of 1 bpm is equivalent to a 1.6% reduction in risk of death from any cause (ref). Subjects with average- to below-average resting heart rates (i.e. >70 bpm) had the largest decreases in sleeping HR after using the Pod. These individuals experienced a 2 bpm decrease in sleeping HR on average. This is equivalent to a 3.2% reduction in risk of death (ref).

Research shows that there is a strong positive association between sleep quality and physical activity levels (ref, ref). After using the Pod, subjects exercised harder, completing 8% more moderate-intensity exercise and 65% more high-intensity exercise on average. Those who logged the least amount of exercise before using the Pod had the most dramatic increases in physical activity after using the Pod. As exercise has been shown to improve sleep and cardiovascular health (ref, ref), the better sleep with the Pod likely improved exercise intensity, which then further improved sleep.

About Eight Sleep

Eight Sleep, founded in 2014 in San Francisco by Matteo Franceschetti, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, Andrea Ballarini, and Alexandra Zatarain, is the world’s first sleep fitness company. At the core of their innovation is the hero product, the Pod – a perfect blend of luxury and technology designed to give you the best sleep you’ve ever had by leveraging innovation, technology and personal biometrics to solve sleep’s biggest problems. The Pod is the perfect upgrade that can be added to any mattress. The Pod optimises your sleep through automatic temperature adjustments based on your sleep stages and other factors.

W: Eight Sleep