I’m so mad that I love Orion’s $2,195 AI mattress pad

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. I mean, come on. 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.

“I was in the office seven days a week, totally neglecting every other area of my life, neglecting my health, sleeping terribly, eating terribly, not working out, and I started to get health problems,” Gestetner told TechCrunch. “I got this inner ear condition, which basically incapacitated me from working for a period of time. 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. “I think sleep is the cornerstone of longevity.”

Despite arriving in two intimidatingly large boxes, Orion was easy to set up. It looks like any sort of plush mattress pad, except it has tubes that connect to a tower, which resembles a chic bedside table from West Elm.

Once that’s done, you download the Orion phone app and work through its setup flow, which involves pouring water into the control tower, which is how the cooling system works. I haven’t had to re-up the water supply yet after months of use, which is impressive. If you share a bed with someone, you can even split the Orion into two “zones” that follow their own unique cooling schedules.

From there, you can simply forget that the Orion is there, except for when you get into your perfectly cool bed each night. It requires very infrequent maintenance.

And if you want, you can use the app to check data about your sleep, like how long you spend in light sleep, deep sleep, or REM, and how often you wake up or toss and turn in the middle of the night.

Speaking of data, it’s worth noting that such intimate health information (i.e., exactly when and how you sleep, in detail) is usually transmitted over the cloud for processing, and so may be compromised if a third party that’s involved in the connection gets hacked. Gestetner says Orion invests heavily in security, but this is still an inherent risk in using a connected health product.

While I can confidently say that the Orion has helped me sleep better, there’s no way I’d ever spend $2,195 on something like this. But I would probably feel differently if I were a Silicon Valley engineer making $500,000 a year.

However, in terms of limiting my phone usage before bed, the $59 Brick has done as much to make me sleep better as the Orion, though the products obviously do very different things.

Gestetner may be a millionaire after his last exit, but he still understands Orion’s price puts it out of reach of most people (it’s less expensive than competitor Eight Sleep’s $3,000 model, at least). He says he is working on a more affordable model.

“Eventually we want to get to a $500 price point product,” he said. “To use the Tesla analogy, this product is our Roadster, and we want to eventually get to our Model 3.”

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