When Orion asked if I wanted to test its $2,195 AI-enabled mattress pad, I agreed purely because I thought it would be funny to write about. What could possibly be “AI-enabled” about something you sleep on? And why does it cost more than my monthly rent in a major city?
The joke, as it turned out, was on me. Over the few months that I’ve had the Orion sleep system, I’ve been sleeping like a baby. Orion is basically a cooling mattress pad that you can control using your phone, and it adjusts temperature as you sleep to minimize how often you wake up in the middle of the night.
Sleeping on the pad feels like flipping your pillow to find “the cool side,” except that now your whole bed is the cool side of the pillow. As for the AI aspect, Orion supposedly learns from your sleep data to modulate temperatures and maximize the quality of your sleep, though I’m skeptical of how necessary these AI features actually are (and how much they contribute to the hefty price tag). By default, the Orion will start cooling down around the time you go to bed, which you manually input.
It will then get colder as you fall asleep, and then when it’s time for you to wake up, it slowly brings the mattress pad back to room temperature, making it easier for you to get out of bed. Orion’s founder Harry Gestetner is only 26 years old, but he’s more experienced as an entrepreneur than his age might suggest: He sold his last company Fanfix, a creator monetization platform, for an estimated $65 million when he was 22 years old. It’s an impressive success story, but these tales are never so glamorous behind the scenes.
The struggles he faced while building Fanfix inspired this new venture. As someone who basically had no hobbies and likes to work seven days a week, that was very difficult.” Gestetner got interested in the longevity movement, which is growing in popularity among some startup or productivity-maxxing types. While he is no Bryan Johnson, it does sound like Gestetner is sipping the Kool-Aid a bit.
He tells me that he thinks we’re five years away from “longevity escape velocity,” which means that “for every additional year you’re alive, AI science is able to add an additional year to your life.” It’s a tough sell, but that’s not what Orion is about anyway. The product is trying to convince you something that you probably already know: You generally feel better after a good night’s sleep. Even Johnson, who has gone to such extremes as infusing himself with his son’s plasma, says that “Sleep is the world’s most powerful drug.” “I think most people just want to feel good, and you know, be able to go play soccer with their grandkids up into their older years,” Gestetner said.
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