How the Sleepbuds maker, Ozlo, is building a platform for sleep data

Summary

Ozlo, the maker of comfortable, easy-to-use “sleepbuds” that drown out outside noise so you can get better rest, is turning its product into a platform. The company’s plan began to take shape last month with the announcement of a partnership between Ozlo and meditation app Calm. But it kicked into high gear at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week as the company met with prospective partners to expand its reach. Those new partners could help Ozlo tap into new audiences and build a revenue model beyond consumer-focused hardware and into the profit-margin-rich world of software subscriptions and healthcare. For instance, software features that use AI or are designed to provide relief to users with tinnitus could be offered as premium subscriptions. And a recent acquisition of a neurotech startup should help Ozlo expand beyond being a consumer product to entering the medical device market, too. How Ozlo’s platform ambitions begin Founded by former Bose employees, Ozlo always intended to build an ecosystem, Ozlo co-founder and CEO NB Patil explained on the sidelines of CES. “The way we did that from the beginning is we built the iOS and Android SDK — so our first-party app actually runs on that SDK. That means whatever you see in our app can be made available to anybody,” Patil said. The mental wellness company Calm, for instance, is using the SDK to tell whether its sleep and meditation content is actually resonating with its customers. While Calm can’t tell from its own app if customers have fallen asleep, Ozlo’s sensors can. The device detects how body movements and respiration rates change, and that data is sent to the Ozlo charging case. There, a machine learning algorithm determines whether someone is asleep or is relaxed. Ozlo’s smart case has other sensors as well, including a temperature sensor and a light sensor that can add more data. Now, that information can be shared with apps like Calm and others. For example, if a user started playing a br...