This 25-Year-Old’s Sleep Problems Gave Him Vertigo. His Response? An AI Mattress Cover That Hit Eight Figures Within Three Months of Launch

For most of the last two decades, sleep was something founders bragged about not getting. Four hours a night was a flex. The less you slept, the more you supposedly wanted it. Elon Musk humblebragged about sleeping minimal hours on the factory floor at Tesla back in the day. 

That story has flipped. Sleep is now the thing high performers want to optimize. A new generation raised on Whoop bands and longevity podcasts chases a good night’s sleep as a badge of honor not a mark of shame.

Harry Gestetner, 25, is one of the new sleep-better generation. Three years ago, he admits to “working like a dog and neglecting every other area of my life” creating his company Fanfix. The company scaled fast and was acquired by SuperOrdinary for $100 million plus, but it came with another price: Gestetner developed vertigo severe enough to take him out of work for a long stretch.

“I was forced to learn the hard way that as a founder I needed to start taking my performance seriously and thinking of myself like an athlete,” he says. “Athletes do a lot of work off the court so that they can perform when they’re on the court. Whereas as founders, we tend to only think about being on the court.”

He got obsessed with longevity and started tracking his sleep. The data told him to spend more hours in bed, but that wasn’t an option. He was in bed; he just wasn’t sleeping. What he wanted was a way to hack his sleep to get more of it.  

The turning point was meeting Dr. Michael Breus, a leading sleep specialist. Breus kept hammering the point that body temperature is the single most controllable variable in sleep quality. If Gestetner could develop a product that measured a person’s temperature throughout the night, he reasoned, he could use AI to nudge their sleep environment toward the ideal state, boosting deep sleep and REM while cutting down on wake-ups.

“I wanted to build something actionable that not only gave me the data, but also actually did something to improve my sleep,” he says.

The result was Orion: a smart cover that lies over any mattress, under the sheets, tracking biometrics and regulating temperature, with dual zones so two people who fight over the thermostat can each get their own climate.

Photo courtesy of Orion

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The cruel irony of building a sleep product: For 18 months, Gestetner had to test early iterations of Orion and it wreaked havoc on his sleep. “I would wake up in the middle of the night, something would go wrong, and I’d pull up Slack and be sending bug reports,” he says. “So there was definitely a period where I’d sometimes question why I built a sleep company.”

But the hardware challenges went deeper than just his own insomnia. Coming from software, where you can code something yourself or with a small team, hardware demanded a different kind of army. Gestetner had to convince electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, sensor engineers, firmware engineers, software engineers. Then he had to convince factories to work with him. When one shut its doors overnight, he had to scramble for alternatives.

“There are quite literally hundreds of moving parts,” he says, “and you have to bet the house every time on inventory.”

Inventory forecasting turned out to be brutal. Orion has gone out of stock three times, each time because demand wildly outran even aggressive predictions.

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Orion’s main competitor is Eight Sleep, the premium temperature-control mattress cover whose Pod models range from $2,998 to over $5,000. Gestetner saw three openings.

Price was the first. He wanted Orion in “every American household,” not just the wealthy. So he engineered it to start at $2,295—undercutting Eight Sleep’s entry price and remaining more affordable across every model tier.

The second was personalization. Orion starts with a sleep test that measures your actual body temperature over a night, then pre-programs the device to your unique thermal profile. Other devices, Gestetner says, didn’t know your actual temperature.

The third was accessibility. Orion doesn’t require a subscription. Human customer support is also key. Gestetner himself spends a couple hours a day talking to customers and is often the one replying on Reddit within minutes of a complaint.

Lastly, Gestetner focused on design and health considerations. Orion’s Smart Cover was engineered to look beautiful in the bedroom. It won both the Red Dot Award and iF Design Award for 2026. More practically, Orion’s core temperature control works without an internet connection. While WiFi is recommended for the optimal experience and app-based features, Eight Sleep, by contrast, requires constant WiFi connectivity for all functions. For consumers concerned about minimizing EMF exposure in the bedroom, Orion’s offline-capable design is a meaningful difference.

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Within three months of launch, Orion surpassed eight figures in revenue. Today, the company continues to grow 112 percent month-over-month. Gestetner says it’s one of the fastest-growing consumer health companies in the U.S.

The growth is fueled by word of mouth. Gestetner believes the best products sell themselves. “You don’t see Rolls-Royce ads on TV,” he says.

But Orion’s ambitions extend beyond the home. Gestetner is already partnering with major hotels to install Orion sleep suites. “In five years,” he says, “every major hotel will have them.”

Beyond that, he sees temperature regulation becoming as standard as air conditioning. “Once you use them, they’re so magical you just can’t sleep without them.”

His vertigo would be the first to agree.