Astral sleepa startup providing a first-of-its-kind digital tool to manage chronic insomnia has raised $6 million in seed funding.
Only in the US, bad sleeping habits not only effects on the economy to hundreds of billions of dollars, but it can also lead to health problems such as heart disease and depression.
There are many apps and devices out there that help people monitor and track their sleep. Stellar Sleep co-founders George Wang and Edrei Chua say many of these are aimed at people with occasional sleep problems, not chronic insomniawhich is defined as having trouble sleeping three or more nights a week for more than three months.
Both Wang and Chua suffer from chronic insomnia and were told they would need six months to a year on the waiting list to be seen by a sleep doctor. Instead, they took matters into their own hands and learned about sleep therapy, a psychology-based methodology that addresses why the person has insomnia in the first place.
“The first line of treatment should be psychological,” Chua said. “However, your doctor is choosing between giving the patient prescription drugs or putting them on a six-month waiting list. Also, much of this medication is not suitable for long-term use and is not going to correct the problem at its root cause.’
Stellar Sleep’s mobile app uses this method to help users break the cycle of those frequent nights awake. Helping users relearn how to sleep well, a clinical evaluation of 500 users found Stellar Sleep to be 50% more effective than sleeping pills.
Here’s how it works: Users download the app, create an account and complete an onboarding assessment so Stellar Sleep can understand the full picture behind sleep issues. It combines several techniques, including cognitive behavioral therapy, acceptance and commitment therapy, and motivational interviewing.
Subscription to the app is $60 per month and users can connect their wearables. Stellar Sleep then creates a customized, interactive program that guides them every day to learn how to sleep well again. The program gets smarter as it provides additional personalization based on users’ sleep statistics.
The new funding represents the first institutional funding for Stellar Sleep. It was led by Initialized Capital with participation from Y Combinator, Lombardstreet Ventures, Switch Ventures, Moonfire Ventures, Scrum Ventures, 8vdx and Goodwater.
Wang and Chua plan to use the new capital to increase the amount of content and curriculum offered on the app. They also want to increase the number of collaborations with clinicians to understand their practices and patients to then provide additional personalization of the user experience.
“We’re focusing on improving our product to make sure we’re able to help anyone who comes in with chronic insomnia, regardless of the cause or where they are right now in their life,” Wang said. “We also plan to expand this program to as many people as we can and grow the distribution side of things.”
